Zune Takes the Day Off

If you have a Microsoft Zune player, it's taking the day off.

The brilliant programmers at Microsoft forgot about the extra day this year because of leap year. Because there was a February 29 that your Zune didn't know about, it doesn't think there's a December 31 this year.

According to the same brilliant minds at Microsoft, your player will be fine tomorrow.

That distant laughter you hear are the folks at Apple, unable to control themselves.

Update: Stay tuned for details on the class action lawsuit. Should be a slam dunk.

Thought for Today

Never bite when a growl will do.

2008 Year in Review

Was fucked.


Predictions for 2009:

More fucked.

Hume

Not all assholes are cops, but all cops are assholes!

Santa Gets $110 ticket while giving out toys.

I Kant Feel My Feet

By understanding the sources and limits of human knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. If an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. All objects that the mind can think about must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality (it does) then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it is possible that there are objects of such a nature that the mind cannot think of them, and so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside of experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. And so the grand questions of speculative metaphysics are off limits, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind.

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In one of my earlier epistemology classes in college we were learning about Cartesian Doubt. Rene Descartes (famous for "Cogito Ergo Sum" or "I think therefore I am") postulated that because we cannot tell the difference between dreams or hallucinations versus real empirical experience, we cannot trust sensory experience. A student disagreed with the idea that we can't tell the difference between dreams and reality. The professor asked how she can tell if she's dreaming or not, and she replied with "I can feel my feet!"

And I distinctly remember thinking "Great, centuries of philosophy and critical thought down the drain because this chick can feel her fucking feet!"

Cool New Toy

Expect more photos on this blog. I know I've promised this before, but now I have this:

Poker Source Full Tilt Poker Freeroll

Poker Source Announcement:

We are extremely pleased to announce a $5,000 freeroll at Full Tilt Poker that is open to everybody who has ever signed up through PokerSource for FTP and has earned at least 300 Full Tilt Points over the lifetime of their account. Players have until midnight on December 20th to earn these points if they have not already done so.

When: Sunday, December 28th at 4:00pm ET
Where: Full Tilt Poker
Prize Pool: $5,000
How to qualify: Have a Full Tilt Poker account that was created through PokerSource and have earned at least 300 Full Tilt Points over the lifetime of their account by December 20th at midnight ET

Plax

I'm a big fan of firearm ownership. I'm a handgun owner myself. Everyone who wants to be should be a responsible gun owner.



There's only two reasons I can think of to carry a handgun into a public place. One is to protect yourself, the other is to protect your stuff.

Plaxico Burress decided to carry an unregistered handgun into a nightclub, so theoretically he wanted to protect himself or protect his stuff. Maybe he was wearing a lot of expensive jewelry, and wanted to protect that stuff.

But I doubt the jewelry or whatever he might be protecting was worth more than the $25 million he's likely to lose from getting caught carrying an unregistered handgun into a New York nightclub. So that reason is pretty illogical.

The second reason, to protect himself might be the reason, except for one thing. HE SHOT HIMSELF. So he didn't exactly keep himself SAFER by carrying the weapon. So that reason seems pretty illogical too.

Wait! I just thought of a third reason. To be perceived as "cool." Well, the entire sports following world is now calling him an idiot, so if that was his intention, it was pretty unsuccessful.

Getting Old Sucks

I re-watched the movie "Grosse Pointe Blank" the other day, for the first time in a long time. When it came out I loved it, because it hit me square in the forehead. I graduated high school the same year as the characters in the movie, and also had unrequited love stories and hitman tendencies. This movie was right in my wheelhouse.


The movie, in case you haven't seen it, is about a man who goes to his 10-year high school reunion in Grosse Pointe, which is just outside of Detroit. He tells everyone that he became a hitman, but nobody believes him. There are several people who followed him there to kill him for accidentally performing a hit on a dog.

Just from that, you can tell that the movie is fantastic. It is, but the story is layered with wonderful details and performances that really must be seen. I was hoping to relive all of that wonderfulness when I saw the movie the other morning before I needed to go to work on the night shift.

But the rewatching just depressed me. Twelve years later and all these people who were "just like me" back then are exactly the same. They look good and young, act stupid and charming and pull it off.

Me? I just got older, fatter and far less interesting.

One of the themes in the movie is the old "you can't go home again" (noted especially when the main character discovers that the house he grew up in is now a Ultra-mart convenience store.)

I discovered that not only can't you "go home" again, you can't relive a connection to a movie you once had. Time marches on, but the movies stay young and beautiful forever.