I am trying to post more

I made a goal a few months ago to try and resurrect my blog but currently I am failing mainly because I am focused on my grad school application which have taken up the majority of my free time. Check back over then next few weeks, I should be back to posting more frequently.

Santa and Me

So I am not a father yet but, my Wife and I have been discussing having kids over the last few months. So this time of year got me thinking about what I will tell my kids about Santa. I am an Atheist and my wife is a little more on the fence when it comes to religion and god. With all our talk about having kids I was thinking the other day what will I tell them about Santa Claus and the story of Christmas. I can't ignore the holiday it is just to much a part of society and my family, to not deal with it. I have a few ideas as to how I want to handle Christmas, but it would not be just my kids effected by my decisions. All the kids they know at school would also be subject to my opinions and actions through my kids, and the last thing I would want is to piss off an evangelical mother (done it before, don't want to do it again).

This is such a touchy subject as a atheist living in America.  Many people view us as a horrible group who have nothing better to do then get mad over the smallest mention of god.  So I am looking for input from other as to how to handle this situation.

Now lying to my kids I have issues with.  However, at the same time, I don’t want my kid tell all the other pre-school kids or their kindergarten class that Santa is not real and ending up with a bunch of angry phone calls.  So I am not sure how to handle this part yet.  I think I will deal with this by leaving the interpretation of the reality of Santa up to them.  Leaving the story ambiguous enough for them to try and draw their own conclusions and let the little imagination take control.  I know by second grade though I was 90% sure Santa was not real and I had folks who use to ring bells in the middle of the night to make us think he was in the house unpacking gifts.  So this is something that I will not have to deal with for too long.

Next would be the story of Christmas.  Now the Santa story is free enough from the Jesus birth story that I can easily separate the two explaining to my kids that Santa is/was a man that gives/gave presents to good children and we celebrate this on December 25th.  And later when they are older and more able to understand explain the Jesus story and why it is tied to Christmas, and where I stand on organized religion.

My biggest goal in all of this is to allow my kids to live a normal life without sacrificing my beliefs or their childhood in the process.  I don’t want my kids when they are older to feel like I took something from them growing up.

Centro CNY

Well since pownce.com is closing down on the 15th I think I will resurrect this blog.  I also believe I am going to revamp the blog and get away from the whole bitch and moan direction this started out in and maybe make it a credible blog that contributes to the web in some way.  Perhaps even post on a regular schedule or at lease more frequently then once every few months or once a year.

But before I do that one more rant.  Then I promise to clean up my ways.  This is a good one I promise.  So Thursday I was going to take a Centro bus into work early because I had a timed experiment that I needed to be ready to work on at 7am so I go outside to catch the 6:11 Bus from by my house to work.  Well 6:20 roles around and no bus.  Thinking I got the time wrong I walk back to my house to check the website to make sure I was right.  Well I was but I also checked and saw the next bus comes at 6:35 so afraid I was late getting to the bus stop I go back outside again to try and catch the new bus at 6:27.  By 6:50 I still have not seen a bus and now worried that I will ruin my experiment I go to my car and drive in and pay for parking at the garage $20 for the day.  I was also 20minutes late to get started, but the experiment works so I was happy about that. Now I chalked this up to a bad day maybe the bus was just running behind or something, I really thought nothing of it till today.

Again I was going to take the Bus into work.  My carpool was either on vacation or just not working today so I figured I would take the bus.  So I again check the website this morning for the bus times and find one at 7:39 that picks up by my house and still not sure if the bus was early or late on Thursday I went out at 7:25.  Now it was 6 degrees this morning.  And waiting at the stop I was freezing.  But I stood there till 7:50 waiting for the bus but nothing.  When I finally gave up because I could no longer feel my ears I had to scramble to find a ride in.

Once at work I called Centro concerned that the bus was no longer passing by my house in the morning and the website had not been updated yet.  What I was told however was that the bus was still running and that it is usually running 10 to 15 minutes late.  Now this is an express bus and I am trying to pick it up at the second stop so I can only imagine how bad it must be at later stops.  What gets me the most about this though is if they know the bus is regularly behind 10 to 15 minutes why do they not just fix the schedule to reflect that so that I am not stuck outside for 25minutes wondering where the bus I was trying to catch was.  Or am I just crazy.

Black Friday Eve

So everyone has their Thanksgiving traditions.  One my fiancee and myself have started over the past few years is to go out after dinner for a drive and look at all the lines of people outside stores for the sales on Friday.   Now if we live in Syracuse,NY so it is not like California or Florida where people could hangout outside stores in a sweatshirt and be fine overnight.  No it is 30 degrees out and snowing yet there are still lines at 7pm all over town for the deals tomorrow.  However looking at the deals online I really don't see anything that would make me want to stand in line for 12hours in the Syracuse cold to buy a tv, or any other product that they might be selling.  But that does not mean I will not drive by the people willing to do that and laugh.  If there is a hell I am sure I am going there.

Ways Apple keeps pissing me off

So my fiancee has an iPod,  and it seems like every other week dam itunes wants to upgrade.  which would not be so bad except that when it upgrades apple feels that it does not want to follow the original installation which made it so it would only appear on her desktop and in her start menu but rather it upgrades and installs across both of our desktops.  So I keep having to delete icons off my desktop and I gave up on removing it from my start menu round about the third week in a row it upgraded.  I mean I got better things to do with my time then deal with apple's inability to fix a simple  little program the first time.   But if that is not bad enough apple also force installs QuickTime with itunes, which is a whole other issue, because now I need to go and turn off all the god dam QuickTime junk after every upgrade which as I mentioned earlier is almost every week.

F the RIAA

So today the first of 26,000 court cases involving the RIAA and individuals who the RIAA has in someway found out are "sharing music"  had its verdict handed out after only 5hours of deliberation.  The first victim was a single mother of 2 who shared a grand total of 24 songs online was found guilty of copyright infringement.  Yes 24 songs, she did this using Kazza.  Apparently she had more songs on her computer most of which she had ripped form her own cd's so they were not in the same shared folder as the Kazza songs.  Which for her was a good thing since it was decide that she would have to pay more then $9,000 a song.  You can find more here.   Yah forget about the giant counterfeit rings over in China and such, this women with her 24 songs is the real evil one.

And with all that is going on now with the Media Defenders and Pirate Bay through the leaked e-mails, show how MD was trying to gather information on people who we illegally downloading movies on-line by setting up their own site.   It is discussing what these companies think they can do.  I would not be surprised if this is how the RIAA got most of the people on its list.

I use to buy lots of CD's I got my first job so I could go out and buy CD's.  But now I just can not bring my self to purchase a CD.  Because beyond the fact that the artist might only get $0.01 of the $13+ dollars I would have spent on that CD.  I know the majority of the money will go to fuel the RIAA war machine.  And I just can not bring myself to do that, so I am now into the indy music scene and smaller independent record labels that are not affiliated with the RIAA.

The other day I heard about this.  While I am not a fan of Radiohead, I am going to buy their new album in hopes that it inspires more bands to do the same and help bring about the downfall of the music industry, because they need to be stopped.  Here is a link to where you can buy the album and  fight the RIAA and show all the other bands out there that they do not need to be apart of a record industry to be successful.

I hate the X-Box 360

There are allot of things in the world that I dislike, the Boston Redsox, Tom Brady, Tony Romo, UConn and G-Town (Go Orange!!) But there are only a few things I truly hate. And right now one of the tops on my list is the X-Box 360.

I have never like the 360 or the original x-box for that matter. The whole pay for on-line play is always a big sticking point with me. But the 360 has gone farther, with its pay for content you already purchased,to the general level of gamers who play the 360 on-line. I mean you can go into any online game and the combined IQ of all the players is less than 100. Truly now the system was aimed at frat boys and 12 year olds. And all the games reflect that. There is not one decent game for the system. FPS do not count, they are all to short, and all the same. And they are the only games that ever come out for the 360.

Now we have Halo 3. And truly this whole 360's out selling Wii's because of Halo 3 bull shit is pissing me off. The only reason they are outselling the Wii is because all the 360's bricked this week and so all the frat boys need to go out and spend their daddies money to get a new one so that they can play Halo. And then what gets me is all the rave reviews of Halo 3 has been getting even though everyone agrees that the single player sucks. So on top of the $60 you need to shell out for the game you now need to go ahead and spend an extra $20 a month to play the multi-player version of the game, which is supposedly the better part of the game; But knowing the level of the intellect of the kids who play on-line. I can't see how listening to a bunch of 12 year olds scream into their head sets about how they are all having sex with each others moms and how all the others are gay could make a game amazing.

I do love Zero Punctuation's review of the game.

Cuse Win!!! Cuse Win!!!

What a win,  It was incredible.  Syracuse 38 L'ville 35.  We were 36.5 point underdogs and we had the lead 21-7 at the half and at one point we were up 38-21 with 8min to go in the 4th quarter.  I am so glad I got to see the 2nd half.  I can not wait to see them play West Virginia in the Dome on 10/6.  I hope we can fill the loud House for that game.

The Code

So today I have been chasing one story around the web. (insert standard someone is gay joke here) Yesterday someone hacked the HD-DVD hexadecimal unlocking code and began to spread it all over the web. And today the DMCA has spent the majority of its day serving websites and people notices to take down the code. All this has done is make more and more people jump to the cause of spreading the code posting it to sites like Digg.com or creating blogs for the sole purpose of sharing the code. I have not been able to go anywhere on the net today (other then here) without hearing about this story and getting request to help spread the code. Then tonight I came across this story: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/05/01/hd-dvd-key-fiasco-is-an-example-of-21st-century-digital-revolt/ talking about the whole situation and the response from the anti-DRM crowed. one of my favorite things done was this: http://www.cafepress.com/09f9 where they are selling items with the code on them. Now I am sure most if not everyone here knows my stance on the whole DRM issue to begin with. That is not why I am posting this here. I have posted this to get other opinions on how this whole situation has been handled by both sides involved. While I understand the implication the leaking of this code has on the industry. I do think that they were setting themselves up for this by implementing the code in the first place, and this is the backlash that they will receive every time they create and release a new HD-DVD lock code. I personally think the best way to deal with this would be to let it stay in the dark corners of the web where it was being spread originally. The majority of the net had no clue this code had been hacked till people started to spread the code to get ahead of the DMCA.

My two cats

Well they are really my fiancees cats, but since we are getting married here they will soon be my as well. Last night I went to bed around 12pm. At first I could not fall asleep, but it only got worse as I could here the two cats running around our apartment scratching things and doing stuff I know they shouldn't. I tried to ignore this and just go to sleep but those two little shits just kept making noise, and pounding around the apartment. Finally around 1am I got up because I could here one of them doing something and I knew it could not be good. There in the kitchen I found Fay standing on top of her litter box and paws stretched out to the garbage can trying to get at something inside. When she saw me she got scared, knocked over the garbage can and ran out of the room where she knocked over a light in the living room. I was not thrilled and was up till about 1:30 cleaning up after her. When I finally tried to go back to bed I found that in my absence my fiancee had moved into the middle of the bed and I had no where to sleep. Not wanting to wake her up I grabbed my pillow and went out to the coach where I was going to sleep. However both cats chose this as the moment when they wanted me to pet and play with them. Not the last 16 hours I have been up, but rather 2am and I had the two of them climbing on me and licking me and crying at me. Finally I just ignored them covered my head with a blanket and finally got to sleep some time after 2am. So today I am exhausted and if we have a repeat of last night again I will drive the two of them far far away and leave them there.