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I previously wrote about the national "do not call" list for telemarketers, and today I found an update on Ars Technica:

In case you didn't know, the FTC is setting up a national Do-Not-Call Registry that telemarketers must consult before compiling their call list, and despite legal attacks, the Registry is still on track.

Good to hear that it is still on track. Surely the telemarketers have a lot of money to throw around and spend on lobbyists, so here's to hoping that the government does the right thing instead of what pays them the most. My only question is: how will I be able to report anyone that violates this? Most use blocked numbers.

I hate rubbernecking. On a 35 mile drive home from a pal's place this morning, I encountered two separate incidences of RubberNecking™. Both caused 4-mile backups that took delayed me by 10 minutes apiece. On a 35 mile trip. Both times the cars involved in an "accident" were 100 feet from the road in the middle median area. Do people expect to see severed heads or something? When do you ever see anything at an accident? How many retards hitting their breaks are necessary to cause a 4-mile backup?

The shitty thing is that the people causing the backup - the ones hitting their breaks to do the first RubberNecking™ - get away without penalty, for they're effectively at the head of the backup. They just drive off. Grrrrr… Great start to the day. >:-o

"All Your Base Station are Belong to Us," my new t-shirt declares. The t-shirt, from Geek Culture and Cafe Press was a birthday present from the fabulous^* Jamie, along with a seasoning packet and a card with a monkey!

While I'm posting on this, I may as well link to the official "All Your Base are Belong to Us" site. This was a running joke in the first group of Cocoa programmers at the Big Nerd Ranch in March 2001. Well, that and saying "If you had read my boooook…" (which I've misappropriated into "If you had read my bloooooog…"). Fun times.

^* Obligatory footnote for the Jamesmeister.

R.E.M., my favorite band, has a stream of a war-track The Last Straw on their site.

If hatred makes a play on me tomorrow
And forgiveness takes a back seat to revenge
There's a hurt down deep that has not been corrected
There's a voice in me that says you will not win.

Reminded via Betalogue - I'd forgotten about this one for awhile. And to Pierre, it's a stream because it's the rough take, as I understand it. A more polished version will be available soon (methinks).

P.S. I don't necessarily agree with R.E.M., but I don't necessarily disagree either. I will say that they've always been fairly political, but that's just pointing out what's obvious to many.

Someone today emailed me (I'll keep his name and MUG out of this) to ask to distribute Recent Tunes, some Freshly Squeezed Software freeware, to his MUG. I granted the approval, but took issue with part of his email:

We compress the programs as self-extracting archives (sea) in order to save space and reduce the amount of entries into our CD cataloging program. Also, we do this so our members do not have to have a separate program to unstuff the archives.

Funny, but our .dmg files are already compressed, use a tool on every Mac (Disk Copy), and are for Mac OS X, whereas .sea files only operate in 9 or Classic (right?). I told him that he could distribute our file as a .dmg only. Self-Extracting Archives? No reason to cling to those things. DMG is the way to go on X.

OSNews reports on (and gets feedback on) the widely reported possibility of all of Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) being metal. Matt and I have railed about the Mac UI Consistency for quite a number of entries (currently that search nets you three of the better results, and will be four soon with the addition of this entry).

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Ugh. If Apple continues to ignore their own HIGs, well, just "ugh."

This week was one of the funniest episodes ever. I wrote everything below last night during the show (live, with commercials, ugh - I like my TiVo and hate having to watch it at Gabe and Daria's). Stupid me forgot to change the status to "Publish" from "Draft." D'oh! I'll jerry-rig the time here to be current… There we go.

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From Somebody Dial 911 comes a ruler favelet that measures distances in your browser - something that can come in handy when you're doing some work. It works fine here in Safari (mind the note not to drag the link - ctrl-click and copy it instead).

It shows the mouse's current position in the browser window, and allows you to measure distances via a draggable marquee.

Definitely an interesting little doo-hickey. I'll have to investigate to find a way to turn it off though, once enabled. It's a pain in the ass to have to close the browser window just to get rid of it.

No really. And I entered the essay contest a few times in college. But hey, my subscription to Playboy (gotten for me by my ex-girlfriend, along with my Maxim subscription) has now served a new purpose: helping fellow Mac developers realize a few seconds of their allotted fifteen minutes.

Incidentally, Jordan (the UK babe) featured in the September 2002 issue ain't that grand. But then again, I'm not really a fan of humongous, overdone, or fake breasts. Pffft.

I'm not sure what BlogShares are, really, but here's mine. I used to play a fantasy sports thing where you bought stock in athletes, and their stock rose and fell, and you sold shares in Michael Jordan to pick up shares of Mark McGwire.

This might be fun, but, more investigation is necessary…

Olivia Newton-John looks better now than she did in the 80s. Wasn't this supposed to be disco week? What the hell? How the heck is country-rock supposed to fit into American Idol? I hate this. I hate twang, I hate it hate it hate it.

I'm tempted to simply not comment like Nick but then I would miss out on my chance to make fun of people. Can't be doing that now can I?

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The filesystem in Longhorn is something I plan to follow (and am, I suppose^*). Dominic Giampaolo has been at Apple long enough to have worked some ideas into Panther, perhaps, so maybe Apple has more up its sleeve to match this than we may think.

I've read enough of Scot Hacker's stuff to understand how much he liked the BeFS, and he made a case for things like the organization of MP3s with various metadata. A media-smart meta-data-heavy DB FS would be pretty handy for, well, me, a database developer (among other things).

^* Why do you suppose by the same root word you're given a suppository?

Is this too blunt?

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A silly old joke I found somewhere:

A Mac user found a magic lamp with a Genie in it. The Genie said he wasn't as powerfull as other Genies and could only grant one wish. So the Mac User brought out a map of the Middle-East and asked the Genie if he could bring peace to the people there. The Genie said "Ah, you see, its hard to do that. Those people have been fighting for years. Its a religion thing, and about territory. Why as soon as they are teenagers, they go to war. Pick something else." So the Mac User said, "Ok, make the Mac OS a pre-emptive multitasking system, that is crash-proof and stable, has support for multiple processors, and still has 100% compatibility with all the current Mac OS apps." So the Genie shook his head and said, "Ah let me take a look at those maps again....."

Look which happened first.

Danielle didn't show up yesterday. Go figure. This "friend" of mine from Cleveland is largely responsible for my recent bout of cynicism. She's done nothing but lie to me, use me, and otherwise abuse what was once a very soft heart for a sob story. I was lulled into being compassionate, and she took advantage.

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