Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

...you try to control your voice mail through your computer keyboard over and over again and you don't realize why it doesn't work until you've made several attempts.

Defective by Design is an interesting group lobbying for the demise of DRM. I probably wouldn't go as so far as to say that I am for banning the practice but the stuff is certainly annoying to say the least. I do think more people should be educated about what they are getting themselves into before they start plunking down hundreds or even thousands of dollars at the iTunes Music Store. Also, while I tend to use my iPod and iTunes for listening to freely available podcasts, I too have been convinced to buy something from the ITMS. I think that's more of a testament to that song than anything else. So, the moral of the story is, the songs may be cheap but it may be a royal pain to use them the way you want to in the future.

Onanism: Masturbation or Coitus interruptus.

I don't just have a prurient interest in includin this word, the etymology of it is pretty interesting as well. Here is a short excerpt from David Plotz's Blogging the Bible:

Another interlude of disturbing sexual politics. Judah marries a Canaanite girl, who bears him a son named Er and then another named Onan. Er marries Tamar, but Er is "displeasing to the Lord" and dies. Judah orders Onan to do his duty by his dead brother and get Tamar pregnant. Onan, knowing the child would be treated as Er's and not as his own, "let the seed go to waste whenever he joined with his brother's wife." This annoys the Lord, who kills Onan.

Why is the Onan story read as a condemnation of masturbation? (Onanism, etc.) It has nothing to do with masturbation. It's about birth control. Onan has sex with Tamar, but spills his seed—this is coitus interruptus. Onan's sin before God is not the self-pleasure of masturbation, it's his failure to breed (and to fulfill his fraternal obligation).

So how would you like to have your name associated with this for all of eternity?!?

Being a good Catholic boy, born and raised, means that I have very little experience in reading the bible. :-) Sure we studied pieces of the new and old testaments in religion classes for the literature value as well as their doctrinal significant but reading the whole bible was never really pushed. Its with that background that I have been reading David Plotz's Blogging the Bible. So far he is up to his 8th installment and has just finished Genesis. David does a good job posting interseting nuggets from the stories as well as providing some perspective on how crazy and bizarre portions of the Bible seem to be. I even learned a new word from the column, Onanism.

So in the end, I am still not reading the texts directly, but I am learning more than I did before and I am being entertained as well. You should check it out.

I just got this comment on my post about the Pirates of the Caribean. Its in Dutch and Babelfish's translation is rather humorous:

hello I am your largest supporter I am 9 years and live on the stone street 22 I am smoor amorous on the pirate who has a red thing on its head I has your film in the russies and I also end up Russia but I can lance talk and write and I julie have seen film in English write back A.U.B something if wheel something goes or on msn

decollete: 1: wearing a strapless or low-necked dress 2: having a low-cut neckline

A few words of wisdom: If you leave your computer playing the audio stream of SOMA FM's Drone Zone and then forget about it, don't be alarmed by the sounds. That's not your hard disk making awful, soon-I'm-gonna-melt-down-and-crash noises, its just the music.

Microsoft has published some screencasts about the new Office 2007 products and the Office SharePoint Server 2007. In particular, the ones looking at using the new Feature Feature, customizing sites with SharePoint Designer and using the new Excel Server look promising.

Joe Wessel's put out an open invite for a Tuesday Night Potluck dinner for people to get to know each other and discuss the future and direction of our fair city. For those who don't know him, Joe is a local reporter and was a host of a local radio show/podcast which is how I first heard of him.

Holding these types of open dinner/chat circles is something that has always intrigued me. It would involve two of my favorite things, cooking and good conversation. Perhaps this is something I can do in the future once Angela and I move into our house and actually have a place to entertain.

I've taken a lot of photos of humorous license plates and posted them here and it seems that someone has caught on. The proprietor of pl8s.org (how very apropos) has contacted me about using some of my photos on his web site. The first one he has used is FUSYGRL.

Google never ceases to amaze me: 3 USD in Euros.

I am still waiting for them to support WHOIS in this same fashion.

Seven Days for SIDS is having their yearly fund raiser this coming week. Its a worthy cause and the organization makes it easy to donate to them since they have organized a lot of local bars and resturants to run specials and to donate portions of proceeds. What I espacially like about their planning is that while they offer the typical (and pricey) special meals at fancy places, they also feature several pubs and wine bars that simply donate a portion of their sales to the cause. That seems like a great way for you to give to a cause by doing an activity that you might already were planning to do.

From NPR's All Things Considered: There Is No Such Thing as Too Much Barbeque. Truer words have yet to be spoken.

Please, someone tell me that the KISS Coffeehouse is a joke. Yes, that KISS. For some reason, the mere thought of ordering a Frozen Rockuccino just makes me laugh uncontrollably.

Update: Sadly when we were at the beach this year, they weren't open yet, so the Frozen Rockuccino is still a mystery to me.

My friend Josh has coined a new word today: craphackular:

Adapted to excite wonder and admiration by a display of trial and error configuration changes to resolve a software or computer outage.

2006 World Cup Stadium Pictures: For those of you like looking at pictures of big public works. Its also good to see that Europe is not immune to having their stadiums named after big corporations.

Free online book: 77 Development Projects with the 2007 Microsoft Office System and Windows SharePoint Services 2007. Its based on beta code so I am sure there are all sorts of issues with it but it looks like it might be a good way of giving you a guided tour of some of the new features of the product.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things and how it makes you think about how humans interact with humankind's creations. In that same vein, Ask Metafilter has a very interesting question (and answers) on why the automobile automatic transmission has the gear order that it does (Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, Low).

I hardly remember signing up for 25 peeps but if you click here you can see my nice black and white mug on someone else's website.

I'm not one for the indie music scene but I thought I would pass along notice of the Desdemona Music Festival which is slated to run next Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It is being organized by one of my favorite local bloggers/political canidates/businessmen, Nick Spencer. Like I said, its not my scene but eventhen I do recognize some of the artists such as Annie, Ghostface Killa of te Wu Tang Clan and Aberdeen City who is frequently featured in my favorite movie review podcast, Filmspotting.

So give it a look see and for $24 for 3 days of music that doesn't seem too bad. Plus, my friend Harry who is seriously into indie music seems to think the line up is the next best thing to sliced bread. I'd even think about showing up if I was going to be in town.

Happy 10th Birthday Slate! Its my favorite web magazine (and I was even a paid subscriber back in the day and have the Slate umbrella to prove it). I hope you have another good 10 years.

Since I am a big Pitttsburgh Steelers fan, and my friend Mark Vaughn being a fan of the Bengals, he natually sent me a link to bigbensucks.com. This contains this gem:

Big Ben's quarterback rating was 22.6, (9/21 completion, 123 yards, 2 interceptions) the worst rating a winning QB has ever had in Super Bowl history

i don't dout that at all...but he has never been a QB in the vein of Manning or Marino with the big individual stats totals. Its all about playing high quality mistake free football on both sides of the ball. Its a team sport after all. Look at Michael Jordan. He was and is the best player in the history of basketball and he never won a NBA championship until he finally got some decent players to back him up.

While watching a baseball game the other day, I had a thought, if there are no players on base, does the fielding team really need to have a catcher? After all, if you didn't play a catcher, you could have an extra infielder or outfielder. I took a quick glance at offical rules governing major league baseball and I didn't see anything that suggested that you have to have a catcher. The only other downside I could see is that to have an official strike out, the catcher has to catch the pitch that the batter swung and missed. Otherwise, the batter can run to first and reach safely if he isn't thrown out or tagged. That certainly would cause you to have to have a catcher if the batter had two strikes on them.

Oh and if you didn't have a catcher, you might piss off the umpire and that's something you wouldn't want to do.

For those who don't know, Angela and I bought a house and tonight will be our first night in the new place. Our possessions are strewn between a bunch of boxes here in the house and in the apartment. I just got finished with cutting grass for the first time since high school when I lived with my parents. In honor of this, I had made sure I had a ceremonial beer ready for the completion of the work, however I made a fatal mistake.

It's not a twist off.

This has made me a very sad panda.