Well, I was pushing shut a basement window today, and my hand went right through it. Nicked two of my fingers and a large shard dropped on my ankle. None of the cuts were as bad as they first appeared and should heal nicely. My window however is ruined.

We were debating whether or not to get new ones anyways, and this sort of seals it.

The post I left the comment on was: http://www.current.tv/google/GC03186

Awesome

I have to get one of these (the treadmill gaming station. I already have a blond, and mine is way hotter than this one lol)…

Would put a whole new dimension into counterstrike, plus would make my treadmilling more fun…

http://www.gamerunner.us/index.html

ROFL.

This one isn’t *that* funny, but the guy with the pot brownies has a hilarious line…

Sweet.

It takes me approx 1 minute and 45 seconds to go from my desk to the bathroom (use it, wash) and back.

I do this at a minimum of 4 times a day (sometimes more. I drink a lot of water/coffee/coke).

There are approx 260 working days in a year.

I am paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $21 an hour, although whether that is before or after tax I don’t remember, nor does it really matter I guess.

So:

7 minutes a day in the bathroom + 260 work days a year = 1,820 minutes a year in the bathroom.

1,820 minutes = 30.3 hours

30.3 hours a year in the bathroom on company time = $636.30 a year to go to the bathroom.

Obviously this number is grossly underestimated since I can sometimes spend around 30 minutes in the bathroom when I have a “long” visit, plus several short visits. Some days I take 1 short visit every 30 minutes (when I drink around 50oz of water, plus 4 cups of coffee, which I have actually done, although I’m sure this only happens about once a month. I chose 4 short visits a day because this is the absolute minimum).

Ok, I will openly admit, I have a tendency to have an extremely overactive imagination which, on occasion, will spew forth paranoid delusional theories about every day normal random coincidences.

Today’s conspiracy theory? Microsoft is paid by the “record industry” to play certain songs through windows media player more than others whilst WMP is on “random” mode.

Why did my mind suggest this to me?

Simple. I just bought 7 cds at Half Price Books that I have never owned before, as well as loading 8 (or more) cds into my computer to add to the current 8 gigs of music that I legaly own that I burned off of cds (again, RIAA, pay attention, that I own). lol…

Anyways, so I’ve got right around 10gb of music on my computer. I put EVERY SONG into one playlist, UNRATED. Which means the computer has no idea whatsoever what songs I like better than other songs.

Now, since these are new CDs, there is no way I can know which songs on the cds I like the best having not heard them all. So one would assume that out of the 3gb of music I have just placed on my computer, roughly 2/3 of this music I should have never heard before. So this means that I should only recognize 1 out of every 3 songs, correct? WRONG.

I have been listening ALL MORNING and have only “not recognized” maybe 4 songs (this is probably an over-estimate). Huh? How does that work?

On top of that, the songs I do recognize are (well, were, since it is mostly old music) extremely popular.

What’s going on?

I then notice that all of the songs have “ghost ratings” which means that M$ has taken the average rating from all of it’s users who have this same song and shown it to me in gray. I can then override that rating with my own, which will show up in gold/yellow.

This shows that there is indeed some sort of “internet connection” happening, highlighted by the fact that all of the CD covers/song titles/band names were downloaded for me upon ripping the music.

So, what is going on? Why am I not hearing songs I don’t recognize?

In reality it is probably because I just happen to know a lot more music than I would like to let myself believe, and that I really only wouldn’t recognize about 1/10 or 1/20 of my music rather than the 2/3 I thought.

In overactive imagination land it is probably because M$ is paid by the record industry to (during random playback) ensure that certain artists and songs are played more often than other artists and songs, and that the more “the industry” pays for certain artists/songs the more likely you are to hear that artist/song.

This doesn’t have to be an ongoing thing. M$ could have a price sheet that says “$10,000 to have your song have a 5x play rating, $7,000 for a 4x, $5,000 for a 3x, $3,000 for a 2x, $0 for a 1x”. Then forever and ever your song will have whatever rating you paid for. M$ then plays 5x songs most often, followed by 4x, etc. So that out of 22 songs 7 would be 5x, 5 would be 4x, 4 would be 3x, 3 would be 2x, 2 would be 2x, and 1 would be 1x (or something like that, could be out of 40 or 50).

This is a double edged sword. It is advantagious for the user as well as the CD company. The CD company pays for the invisible star rating, these are normally going to be the “really good” or the “really popular” songs. Then when you load a bunch of music on your computer and play it you are more likely to be happy with what is played, and the “industry” has a small amount of control over which songs you are hearing.

What’s in it for them? Why would they do this? To get you to buy the cd. Let’s face it, there are millions upon millions of GB out there of illegal music. Pretty much every nerd/geek/hacker/computer user I know has at one point downloaded/borrowed/gotten through less than legal means music.

So, if you know that people are out there listening to your music illegally, what would be the smartest thing to do? Make sure they listen to your more than someone else’s. Eventually, chances are, once they have the money, they will buy your crap. There are many many reasons people steal music. I won’t pretend to know what the number 1 reason is, but I would be my collection that somewhere in the top 5 is “I just can’t afford it right now”.

Can you picture some 30 something making 100k a year risking his net worth by downloading illegal music? F-NO. Not if he/she is smart. Especially if they have kids.

So, this means that it’s mostly just a bunch of young kids with nothing to lose really. Ok, so what happens when they grow up, and get something to lose (family, job, house, car, junk)? They start behaving a little better.

So when that happens, if you are the industry, you want to make sure that they keep hearing your music so that at this point they might go “hrm… I have a bunch of illegal music, what happens if RIAA comes after me? I lose… well… everything. So maybe I should clean out my collection and purchase my favorite stuff”. Well, their “favorite stuff” is probably going to be the stuff they heard the most. Which means the stuff with the 5x rating. Which is why “the industry” would pay M$ to play their music more than other people’s music.

Oh, and if you keep hearing Maroon 5 (with a 4x rating), then when they come out with a new CD you are more likely to buy it, which is why Sister Hazel never plays in your playlist, they didn’t pay the piper and now they have a 0x rating where Matchbox 20 has a 3x and plays almost as often as Jack Johnson and Snow Patrol who have a 4x, but not quite as often as Keane’s “Frog Prince” which has a 5x (while the rest of the Keane CD only has a 3x, which is why you don’t hear any of their other songs that much). Get it? Got it. Good.

So yeah, I know all of this is paranoia, but now that I have explored it further… why wouldn’t Microsoft do this? No reason I can think of…

(Note: The image that I based my windows media player montage on is from this site: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/123051/2111767/2121805/050727_mb_Payolacolor_tn.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.slate.com/id/2123483/nav/tap1/&h=150&w=205&sz=16&hl=en&start=8&sig2=f4isglXsxmYhaYdbuRRQhw&um=1&tbnid=5az-XfPvCRbiCM:&tbnh=77&tbnw=105&ei=DJpIRrm4GoTOiQGv663PCA&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpayola%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN)

So I was enjoying my peaches today, and I looked at the “enjoy by” date and saw that they would safely last until March 1… 2008. Wow, but before I could be amazed that something grown on a tree could stay good for over a year, I read the line above it “Peaches from china”. WHAT??????

How can a country so overpopulated that they kill their unborn en-mass be able to grow enough peaches for the good people at Dole?

Kind of a weird decision. Where is the logic in it? Hrm… what should I do today… build a second bedroom for another baby, or save the room for a peach tree… Hard decision… hrm…

Now, I know that this isn’t exactly the process, but when you think about it that’s kind of what it comes down to.

I guess I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as “overpopulation”. There may be “more crowded than our current crowdedness”.

But seriously, we are humans. We solve problems. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Let’s say that the earth were somehow in danger of being SO crowded on our available land masses that we just didn’t have room to grow our food and live. What about the ocean? It’s not like there isn’t over half the earth that is somewhat easily traversable teaming with life(food). I’m sure we could come up with some sort of stable bubble island system that floats like icebergs (the big parts below). Or perhaps we dig down two miles, build a massive tunnel system, and just reserve the surface for growing food, and use a massive mirror system to bring daylight below (or even just capture the daylight and transport it below where we release it from orbs on demand or something.

So yeah, what’s up china? Why can you grow peaches but not people? You really think that killing tons of babies every year is a good alternative to having to find them a place to live instead? I’ll never understand how a “successful” country can mandate the killing of it’s unborn. Then again, America does it too. At least it isn’t forced on us by the govt.

Oh, and if the earth ever got that crowded, it would just wipe a few million of us out through some sort of plague and “start fresh”. IMO this is a much better alternative to killing our own babies. People who think this place is too crowded can go get sterilized and shut up. In fact, I think this is a viable alternative to killing babies. Chinese people, rather than being forced to kill their young, should just be forced to be sterilized. Be proactive about this sort of thing rather than reactive. Sure, maybe you don’t want to be sterilized, but I bet the baby doesn’t want some scissors shoved into it’s head, it’s body blended up, and the pieces sucked out by a vacuum while it struggles for it’s life. What abortion isn’t piece-full and painless??? No.

I just watched the movie “blood diamond” where the viewer was meant to be shamed into never buying a “conflict” diamond because of the horrible murderers that enslave their own people to get them. I guess when I think about it, wouldn’t these be “conflict peaches” since by eating them I’m supporting a communistic infanticidic regime? Eh… whatchagonnado? Nothing to be done really… Except stop using technology, driving cars, eating food, or basically doing anything that’s not living outside of a hole in the ground eating worms/bugs/berries in a wildlife preserve (would you be considered wildlife then? Aren’t we just complicated monkeys?).

On the positive side, these “blood peaches” are pretty good…

The end of this video made me laugh pretty hard:

I just donated. If you use Linux, you should think about donating too. Just for fun. It would be cool to have a linux race car this year. Even if you just give $1…