+ LA county wants to banish the term “Master/Slave” from product descriptions and labelling.

From Alex a link to an article espousing a stylish military as the way to a more effective military: NYPress - Cage Match - Matt Taibbi - Vol. 16, Iss. 48

+ And Kim came across this intense pro-Islam/anti-US post at istanbul.indymedia.org.

+ From Metafilter, a viscious tale of crack life in Dallas.

+ I sent these two links out to some of my politically minded friends. They are interviews with linguist George Lakoff on the topic of framing to dominate politics:

+ Geronimo’s “true name” was Goyathlay, or One-Who-Yawns in his people’s language (the Bendonkohe Apache).–he was one of my heros when I was a young teen and reading everything I could find about Native Americans; their lives, culture, history, folklore…that obssession didn’t last more than a few years before I discovered sciencefiction and…

The easiest method, that I’ve been able to find, of creating a bootable Windows XP SP1 CD using Nero.

+ Went imaginary T-shirt-shopping at 2ktshirts this evening. This is what I bought:

Lyn Garland

Huntergatherer

Tom Sachs

Build

Ben + Renee

Andy Mueller

+ Convenience Will Pacify, part of Rik Catlow’s submission to the Whitney Museum’s Biennial Exhibition.

In our disposable convenience culture we are constantly fed new ways to make things easier, faster and better for ourselves. TV Dinners, cell phones, PDA’s- all of these so-called advancements are in the name of convenience and American corporations love to push these new advancements because we usually pay more for these conveniences. Whether they call it “travel size” or use buzzwords like “on the go” they are trying to sell you convenience.

The main problem with this type of thinking is that it is short-term. Our landfills are filled with the long-term results of our easier life. Nothing symbolizes convenience more than the aluminum can. We have utilized this economical container so much we had to devise ways for recycling them, which in turns makes the cans cost even more to produce, thus negating the short-term gain.

The purpose of these paintings is to extend the term of something that someone so easily discards. Every day while walking in the streets, I see cans crushed by hours and hours of traffic. My thought was that these cans are smashed into beautiful small canvases. By creating these paintings, I’m trying to inform the viewer that convenience has unseen costs and usefulness never expires.

-sorry Rik, but screw the statement. No one give a fk these days. All that matters is looking cool. And that they do.

+ Wanna see me act? Check out “Events” > “11″ and launch the video at soundproof.ca. I’m the villain. Soundproof is a collective of my friends who put underground parties on in Vancouver. At the last few parties there’s been a tradition developing of projecting some sort of funny video between dj sets starring BGR (Big Gay Ron) and Technosaurus (a stuffed orange dinosaur). For last weekend’s party, David was planning to propose to Stephanie, so we wrote a screenplay to lead into him proposing to her; David gives a package with an engagement ring to a gay man in a wig and purple dress (BGR) and a stuffed orange dinosaur (Technosaurus) to deliver to the Soundproof party. They stop at starbucks and are distracted by…funny stuff. Hopefully I can have a part in more videos, cause I loved being part of a project that made a couple hundred people laugh as freely as they did.

Stephanie looking like a sexy goth member of the Plasmatics from the 80’s said “Yes”. -how could she not, David and her are great together.

The party was calmly busted at 6 am by a couple of cops who really aught to have been busy fighting crime elsewhere.

Last week I was reinstalling Mandrake on my hard drive into my Linux partition as a way of repairing Lilo. I forgive myself for doing what I did cause I was tired. I typed “y” for yes when Mandrake’s installation proceedure offered to repair a couple damaged sectors of my hardrive. It even warned me of possible data loss. I lost access to 58 gigs of data, video and music on my Xp hard drive. I laughed. What can you do. I booted up my spare 10 gig harddrive and tried to access my main hard drive. I kept getting a message pop-up informing me that the hard drive was not formatted and would I like to do so now? Ha ha, tired and not paying 100% attention yes, but inexperienced no. I googled around till I found Stellar Phoenix. In a matter of about 6 minutes it listed everything on the drive, and a day later I have pretty much restored all my data onto the spare drive.

Next I will attempt to repair the main drive, not because I have to, but because I want to see if it can be done. DIY DataRecovery has a piece of software called “diskpatch 1.0″ that they state will “recover data that was lost due to deleted and lost partitions, corrupt boot sectors, partition tables and a corrupt MBR by repairing those structures. Prevent data loss by backing up important system structures as the MBR, partition tables or the LDM database (XP/2000). Also perform additional tasks as cloning your disk, scan for read errors and low level formatting.”

Since Winamp got incredibly slow to load, and Winamp 5 isn’t an effective solution for using Winamp 3 skins in Winamp 2, I have been using jetAudio. Has it been a year? If not, it’s been nearly one, and I’m much happier with JetAudio’s functionality. Sure it requires “40 MB” (a 17.8 MB download), but on my average sized 70 gigs of Hard drive space that aint much. It still manages to load faster than Winamp, and it even has heaps of great features:

Supports all major audio and video file formats, including RealMedia.

Converts, records and broadcasts to mulitple file formats (get the Plus version and you can convert, record and broadcast to MP3 and MP3pro -I have the Plus version! Buy it for $29.00. The free version doesn’t include the MP3/MP3pro features, but has every other.)

Rips audio cds

Record from various input sources; mic, stereo (old cassettes?), anything passing through your soundcard.

Broadcast your music to the internet.-I don’t know if it supports listing on the Shoutcast index…

Edit file tags

Has a 16 band equalizer and sound effects like “X-Bass”, “Wide”, “Reverb”, “Hall”, “X-Surround” and “X-Fade”.

Ability to utilize Multi-channel soundcards

Speed control for watching video in slowmotion.

A timer to use JetAudio as your alarmclock.-a coool feature that I have yet to try!

And, because it’s a Korean company that developed JetAudio, something called “Syncronized Lyric”; “Change your PC to karaoke machine, and enjoy sing-a-long with your family! jetAudio supports MIDI-Karaoke (.kar format), and MP3 synchronized lyric tag (ID3v2). You can make your own MP3 synchronized lyric with included Lyric Maker. With a very simple interface, you can make synchronized lyric in a few minutes. jetAudio changes color of each phrase of lyric in accord with the beat of a song so that it is easier for you to pick up the beat and sing along. This particular function makes it fun for you to learn a new song.”

It’s a super-feature-packed piece of software that has run flawlessly on my machine for months. Though I read in c|net’s review that ” if you have a massive, messy MP3 collection with loads of playlists, perhaps it’s not (ideal). JetAudio treats a playlist as an album and uses the artist as its primary key field, making it difficult to locate mixes.. -otherwise go get it!

Fish Farting, from Devon who seems to think I might get a kick out of it. I do. Seems pretty damned odd that Ben Wilson, a biologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, actually studied herring farting. Though I have to admit it’s an interesting supposition that maybe these farting noises help orient the fish at night.Maybe that’s why people fart when they sleep with each other…

And coool, you can even hear a herring fart by clicking here.

This patent ruling could change the future of internet music transactions. If accepted as valid, SightSound, holder of a fairly vague patent, could negotiate a pretty bling-bling future.

Funny, I’ve never given OpenOffice a chance. Always blindly installed MS Office, but why? Why am I using this “expensive” software, when OpenOffice is free, and can pretty much do everything overpriced MS Office can? I asked myself that, and had no answer..only I heard a little voice whining in my ear, what if it doesn’t look good? For some it doesn’t seem to matter, but me, I can’t use anything that’s unattractive. -I just downloaded it, and if it looks good MS Office is history.