QotD

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
- Edward Abbey

The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.
- Oscar Levant

Windows: bringing Gamers and Users closer together.

What makes me laugh most about This Article about Windows Vista is that it seems like the base requirements for running a Windows machine are getting closer and closer to the sort of specs I would expect on a mid-to-high-grade gaming machine.

A bark worse than it's bite.

An article about another RIAA case dropped makes an interesting note:

At the bottom of the Ars Technica article, you'll find the sentence, "Since the RIAA began filing lawsuits against suspected file sharers in 2003, not a single one has gone all the way to trial." Thank you. Not enough people know about that (or, while we're on the topic, that no one has ever even been sued for downloading music, only for sharing it).

This makes me happy.

I'm a vegitarian because I hate plants.

So, over the weekend I went out to get my car's 10,000 miles maintenance done. We'll ignore for the moment that I'm managed to put 10,000 miles on my car in two months and instead focus on the TV show that was playing while I watched.

In particular, it was one of the myriad talkshows that are on mid-day during the week, and there was some actress or another from a recent B-horror movie. The 'interview' was rally shallow and short, but at one point the actress said she was afraid of spiders and killed them on reflex. This was notable because, she said, she was a vegetarian.
Which struck me as odd. I mean, she didn't eat the spider, she just killed it. This confusion was cleared up, though, when the host explained that being a vegetarian means you care about animals. Oh, OK; I always thought being a vegetarian meant you didn't eat meat.

Maybe it's just me but I find this glomming of terms and ideologies rather annoying. Never mind the fact that I, personally, think it's a rather dumb move to change one's diet -- that which the body uses to run and maintain itself -- just because you like kittens and puppies is a rather stupid idea. I think it's perfectly valid to be a vegetarian for health reasons: if you find a given diet is more or less beneficial to you, by all means act on that. But I don't think being a vegetarian is necessarily coupled with a driving sympathy for lesser species.

And it's a fallacy that's made on both sides of the fence. I know people who speak rather derisively of vegetarians, and make snap-judgments about people based on whether or not they order the Sirloin. Why? Because vegetarians must be bleeding-heart PETA fans who would sooner invite the family dog to the dinner table than a baby.
There's nothing wrong with sympathy for animals -- I love kittens as much as the next guy. and it's alright to want to ensure they're treated appropriately and not abused and that sort of stuff. It can go a bit overboard when you're dressing up Fido and giving him choice bits of filet mignon, but anything can get out of hand. What bothers me is the blind, knee-jerk pairing of ideologies and behaviors.

I'm just bad at consuming.

So, in other news, I've got an agreement with Verizon where they'll give me a new phone every two years if I agree to sign a new contract with them. I've been waiting for my current phone to hit the two-year mark (notably, the first one ever to do so in one piece), and went out this weekend to get a new phone.

I got a RASR. And I kind of like it, but I have misgivings. Most notably, the RASR is a flip-phone, and I'm less-than thrilled with those. They're inconvenient, in my opinion, having to flip them open to use, and they break more easily than solid phones (like my old phone which survived it's contract).

I have about half a mind to go in and exchange the RASR for an LG Chocolate, which is a solid-type phone with a slide-down keypad and a touch-screen interface (apparently).

I like the RASR's talk-to-call and Bluetooth capabilities, but apparently Chocolate has the same bits.

Does anyone out there know anything about either of these phones? Any reason why I should drop the RASR or avoid Chocolate?

Don't read beauty magazines: they will only make you feel ugly.

So, I was reading This Article on weight, and then followed their link to the online BMI calculator. and assuming a height of 5'11" and a weight of 185lbs, it tells me that I'm just over the 'overweight' line.
 
And to be honest, I'm not exactly sure how I feel about that.
 
I'll be the first one to say that Americans' opinion on appearance and health is more than a little bit skewed. The Media (monolithic entity that it is) tells us what pretty is, but the image it paints is hardly realistic and, at least for my part, not all that attractive in practice. people are over-concerned with what the numbers on the scale say and not interested enough in how healthy they actually are.
 
I think I'm fairly healthy. I don't think I get tired out too quickly from activity, I don't think I'm particularly unhealthy. I do know I could eat better, if I took the time and applied effort. And I could certainly benefit from exercising a bit. And I guess, if pushed, I do think I'd feel better about my weight if it were more like 160 or 170.
 
But even at that, I think the 25.5 or whatever the BMI comes up as on my guestimated measurements (I may be closer to 190lbs these days, but I don't know the last time my height was accurately measured) is getting me more down than I think it should.
 
I don't want to be fat. And I don't think I am. But... -shrugs-