What's this world coming to?

To answer that pressing question, here comes the latest via the National Post. A man, I mean woman, wait I mean man, is giving birth to a child. What, don't believe me? Check it out for yourself!

Pixar's Wall E

Pixar, my favorite animation studio, is back again this coming summer. This time it's about a robot in the future called Wall-E. Frankly, I don't care what their movies are about. I'm there no matter what.

My first exposure to Pixar was several years ago when Toy Story 2 came out on VHS/DVD. My sister, my nephews, and I took a trip down to Cincinnati and they had brought it with them to watch. I had avoided seeing the Toy Story movies because I thought they were truly kids' movies. Well, they are to a certain extent, but what I realized with that first viewing was a well told story with characters that had depth and a story that could captivate children as well as adults.

After that I was hooked. Since Monsters, Inc., I have seen every Pixar film in the theaters and own all of the movies on DVD.

Wall-E is coming out this summer and I anxiously await its arrival. Have a look at the trailers. It looks like they have another winner on their hands.

Climate Change?

Count me as one of those skeptics when it comes to global warming being caused by man. Here comes an interesting article/interview from The Australian by Christopher Pearson on an interview with Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy. In it, the latter two discuss some very interesting data being collected by NASA's Aqua satellite in which many of the models from the global warming freaks are not accurate at all. Have a read for yourself.

I guess this means that Al Gore's cash cow for carbon offsets might be a bust? Let's hope!

Sub Notebooks

A whole slew of companies are coming out with these sub-notebook computers for $400 or less. The most popular one is the Eee PC from Asus. There's also the Everex, which has gotten some bad reviews. Now comes one from Intel, who you might recall had a competitor to the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) computer. It's called the Eco PC and will get you a 900 mhz Celeron, 512MB ram, 40 GB hard drive, Wifi, and ethernet. Engadget has some pics of the machine.

These machines are basically internet devices. You're not going to be doing any video rendering or playing Crysis on them. So why the hell do I want one of them? Again, as I discussed with the Chumby, it's not anything I need. I have this desire to have these gadgets and anything that looks cool is something I want.

With that said, if you're looking for a notebook to have at your home that you want to be able to take around and have the ability to surf the net, these are the ideal thing for you. It won't set you back a lot and it will satisfy that desire of wanting to be always connected without having to be attached to your desktop.

One note: Keep in mind that most of these sub-notebooks, under$400 are primarily run by Linux. Asus is supposedly going to give you the ability to purchase it with Windows eventually, but that will also raise the price. So YMMV.

Theme parks aren't for me

Yesterday my wife and I decided to go to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom (formerly known as Marine World) in Vallejo. My wife had asked me to go last season. I was up for it until I found out that it's a theme park. Well, we decided to go anyway and I have officially decided that theme parks just aren't for me.

I've never been a fan of the tall roller coasters. I remember when I was a kid going to Astroworld all the time and loving it. Yet, I do remember being terrified of those roller coasters that went up really high. In fact, the first time I was able to ride the Texas Cyclone at Astroworld, I screamed the entire time and had my head down as well.

First off, theme parks are a rip off! Last November we went to Seaworld in San Diego and I paid almost $50 a ticket that included a military discount that my wife's aunt got for us. Then I had to pay $10 for parking. Third, Shamu was closed that day and frankly there weren't many animals there to see. I saw more at the San Francisco Zoo. We ended up leaving after only having been there for a few hours.

So we get to Discovery Kingdom yesterday and I am forced to pay $15 for parking!!! Can you believe it?! I paid $35 a ticket online PLUS a $3 convenience fee for purchasing it online! What the hell is that? And of course when you get there, you have to go through a metal detector and have your bags searched. Fine, no problem. What are they looking for in your bags? Oh that's right! They're looking for your outside food and drinks. You're forced to pay their exorbitant prices, where they want you to pay $3.50 for a 20oz. bottle of soda!

Fine, I can accept all of this. But then all of the freaking rides were closed and didn't open until half way through the day! Even a number of their animal exhibits were closed. What a ripoff!

For the entire time that we were there, we rode a total of three rides. And those rides were relatively tame. One was a ride where you sit in a bucket cart of some sort and it spins you around and around. The second was a big boat that went back and forth, like a pendulum, gradually going higher and higher. That one did not sit well with my wife and frankly, it didn't sit well with my stomach. The third was basically a big swing that we all went around in a big circle going higher and higher.

I think this is the final lesson for me. I really don't care for theme parks. And I don't get my money's worth. I think I paid $13 a ticket for the San Francisco Zoo. I saw much more, enjoyed it and felt I got more than my money's worth. I also got to park for free.

Seriously folks, you still question capital punishment?

Unreal! How can people like this exist? I really hope this bastard gets the full punishment of the law! And no, I don't mean life in prison! I want the SOB hung by his balls!

I'm drooling

Engadget has hands on with the upcoming 2.0 firmware for the iPhone. I really hope the wait is worth it. Can't wait for June!

Ick!

As if it couldn't get any sicker for some of these politicians, comes this from Fox News:

Both former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey and his one-time driver insist that they engaged in three-way sex with McGreevey's wife, Dina Matos McGreevey, who is in the midst of a nasty divorce from from the now openly gay ex-governer.

Really, when is this crap going to end?

Democrats trying to suppress the vote again

Michigan was slapped and smacked earlier this primary season for moving their primary up in the schedule against the DNC wishes. So Barrack Obama (Hillary Clinton decided otherwise) and other democrats pulled their names from the vote since Michigan's delegates were not going to be counted.

Well, that was all well and good when it didn't matter at the time. Now it does matter since Hillary refuses to quit (Don't you just LOVE it!). And since Florida's efforts to do a another vote have failed, Michigan is trying their course.

Well, it turns out the DNC won't allow those cross over democrats that voted in the Republican primary a chance to vote if this possible do-over happens. According to the AP, "Michigan Democratic Chairman Mark Brewer says the party has the right - and the responsibility - to prevent non-Democrats from having a say in who the party's presidential nominee should be." And here I always thought it was Karl Rove that was the master mind behind voter suppression.

Yikes!

Alright, I'll ask the more pertinent question: What if I don't want either one, little alone a combo? Oooohh, I think I'm going to have nightmares about this one.

More on Reverend Jeremiah Wright

Politico.com has an article from Ben Smith about a major speech that Obama is going to give tomorrow in Pennsylvania on race relations and his former pastor. "The caricature that’s being painted of him is not accurate," according to Obama. Oh, so now it's not accurate! Does that mean you really do agree with what he has to say Mr. Obama?

Tent Cities and the supposed mortgage crisis

Below is a report from the ever objective BBC about tent cities that are popping up in the U.S. due to the mortgage crisis. Where's the rest of the story? As one of the women interviewed states, as soon as she gets a full time job and save money for a car she'll be on her way up. But wait? What I want to know is when these people lost their homes, that meant they lost their jobs and their incomes as well??? Sure, I'm buying that! Something doesn't make any sense. If you were a Brit and didn't know much about the U.S., this report almost makes you think that these tent cities are a common occurrence here. There is something else missing from this report: the blame for all of this! Which of course, we all know is due to Bush's tax cuts for his rich cronies like Michael Moore, Bill Clinton, Barbra Streisand, et. al.

Alec Baldwin is distressed

Poor Alec Baldwin is distressed over losing his buddy Elliot Spitzer. He's distressed because he was principled. Baldwin was just as excited about Spitzer's election as much as the elections of such principled politicians as Bill Clinton, Teddy Kennedy, and Up Chuck Schumer. Bill Clinton who did not have sexual relations with that woman, Teddy Kennedy, the man who was responsible for Mary Jo Kopechne's drowning. I suggest Baldwin find some other politicians to look up to!

More on Obama's Pastor

Hotair.com has more video, courtesy of Fox News Hannity & Colmes, on some of the outrageous things that Obama "vehemently disagree[s] and strongly condemn[s]". Uh huh...and Bill Clinton didn't inhale or have sexual relations with that woman!

Why do I want one of these?

I am a complete and total gadget geek! If I had the money, I would buy virtually every mildly amusing gadget on the market. Alas, I do not have the money so I have to pick and choose. For now, I have to be content with my iPhone, iMac, Macbook, PSP, Nintendo DS Lite, and my original 4G iPod. But dammit, I want this toy too!
It's called the Chumby and I really want one. It's a Linux based device that you can sync via WiFi with the internet to get personal updates on news, sports scores, etc as well as function as an internet radio device. If it were only a little cheaper. $180 is a little steep for this kind of toy, though.

CNN in trouble?

Could this be a sign? Only the God Lord above knows for sure.

For those that question capital punishment...

....I give you Mr. Corey Saunders. (Click the photo for the full story)


Let's hope the bastard gets what's coming to him!

WTF!?

One of my dreams is to go scuba diving with sharks. However, I don't know if I want to get this close.

Obama's Former Minister

Barack Obama's former (just found this out today) minister has said some pretty damning things (pun intended) about America and Hillary Clinton.

Obama has attended this church for over 20 years. And now this same minister is an adviser to his campaign. As Michelle Malkin points out, we now know why Michelle Obama is suddenly proud of this country for the first time in her adult life.

The Elliot Spitzers and the wives that stand by them

So I'm sitting here wondering why women continue to stand by their man when they have repeatedly sinned against them and their vows. Why do women like Spitzer's wife or someone like the presumed President Hillary Rodham Clinton do this? Is it the power? Is it the insecurity? Is it the children? Is it the love the wife has?

My wife and I are still newlyweds, but I can't imagine her sticking by me if I were to do something like this. So why do they stand by their man? I've asked a lot of questions. Unfortunately, I have no answers.

iPhone hacking woes

I have no intention of writing another review or suggestions for this or that. My wife bought the both of us iPhones back in August. I've loved my iPhone ever since and frankly, it's the best phone I've ever had.

What I'm writing about is a cautionary tale. Shortly after we got our phones, I discovered the world of jailbreaking the phone. Jailbreaking, for those that don't know, is basically hacking your phone so you can install unapproved, third party applications on the phone. There are numerous programs out there to accomplish this. One of the first programs out there was AppTap. It is still the primary program to install third party apps on it. Back in the 1.0 to 1.0.2 firmware days, all you had to do was basically put the program on your phone and you were good to go. Then Apple came out with firmware 1.1.1 and that all changed.

Many people that wanted the phone, were also not happy about being locked to AT&T as their provider. So some clever people figured out how to unlock the phone using software. There are numerous ways to accomplish this. When 1.1.1 came out, Apple "bricked" a lot of those phones. And by bricked, I mean they were no longer able to use the phone, period! Apple requires that the iPhone be activated through iTunes. This enables Apple to maintain control over YOUR phone! And I'm sure AT&T wasn't too happy about losing that revenue, since they're locked in to a 5 year exclusive agreement with Apple.

When 1.1.1 came out, it was hacked by exploiting a security hole in Safari. Fortunately, after 1.1.1 came out, a lovely little site came out simply called, jailbreakme.com. All you needed to do was point Safari to that website, and with a couple of clicks, your phone was hacked.

Then 1.1.2 came out and that hack was changed. Now what had to happen was your phone needed to be downgraded, then hacked using the aforementioned security hole, then upgraded again, that is, if you were dumb enough to upgrade it in the first place. Yes, I was that dumb.

Here's the dumb part, I did this not only to my phone, but I did it to my wife's phone as well. Well, I left her at 1.1.2 and I eventually grew tired of my phone crashing. That's the problem with some of this hacking and what not, you never know how reliable it is going to be. My phone would repeatedly crash and I'd have to reboot. This would happen several times a day. So I eventually eliminated the hacked (I HATE that the geeks out there call it jailbreak!) part of the phone and went legit again.

I left my wife's phone hacked. So when 1.1.3 came out in January, shortly after Jobs' keynote at Macworld, I was stoked about the pseudo-GPS capabilities on Google Maps. I upgraded again and left my wife's phone hacked with 1.1.2. Then 1.1.4 came out at the end of February and I heard about this iPhone jailbreak app that I hadn't heard about before. It's called Ziphone and the app is quite handy and user friendly. In the early days of jailbreaking, there were some one-touch apps that would do the job, but a number of the techniques required command-line access and hacking that was beyond my scope of skills. The thing is, after I went legit again, I still missed a number of the third party apps out there. So I just couldn't resist.

Well, after hacking it again for the umpteenth time, all was fine, for about a week, that is. The first thing that went wrong, was after getting off the phone with my wife, I lost speaker volume and couldn't get the phone to make any sounds. That was enough for me, so I went legit AGAIN! Wait, didn't I say earlier, "The first thing that went wrong..." Yes, you guessed it, I couldn't resist! So I hacked the phone one more time.

It was nagging me that my wife's phone didn't have the latest firmware. So I updated her phone and put her legit as well. That's when hell broke loose (note the spelling folks!) for me! I couldn't get her phone to activate. Oh crap! Did I just brick her phone? I tried everything. I restored, I forced a manual restore. I used Ziphone to "refurbish" it and nothing! The site said the iTunes store was not able to activate and gave me error (-4). I was crapping myself! I couldn't get it to work. So finally, I tried another jailbreaking app called iNdependence and used that app to finally activate it. All was well in the world.

Or so I thought. Then I attempted to sync my now hacked phone, and guess what? Remember how I said, "The first thing that went wrong..."? Well the SECOND thing that went wrong was I got another error that said iTunes couldn't sync my bookmarks because the iPhone canceled the sync! WTF!!!!??? That's it! So I decided to restore it and put it back to it's legitimate ways again. I had had enough!

Well, here's the THIRD thing that went wrong: I couldn't FUCKING ACTIVATE MY PHONE!!!!! So I had to use iNdependence again, this time on MY phone. Guess what? A fourth thing went wrong! I STILL couldn't sync my bookmarks and got that same error as before. Well, it turns out that one of those lovely third party apps I had installed, put some bookmarks on my phone's bookmarks that iTunes apparently did not like. Simple solution for this was just to erase those bookmarks.

Oh yeah, remember all that trouble I had with activating both my wife's and my phone? Well, it looks as though the iTunes site was indeed down for that. Because during my typing of this post, I restored my phone again just to make certain since I found it odd that both phones would have that problem. It activated through iTunes with no problems.

Here's the moral of the story: Think long and hard before you decide to do something like this. Keep in mind, I am a computer geek and I am, for the most part, very comfortable with the inner workings of apps and hardware. Not that I am an über geek, but I am a geek. If you don't know what you're doing, DO NOT attempt this! Hell, I am going to take my own advice and not do this ever again. I loved a lot of those third party apps, but it just is not worth the instability and the possibility of your phone getting totally fucked.

Fortunately, Steve Jobs announced the long awaited SDK (software development kit) for the iPhone on March 6. Unfortunately, we have to wait till June for that. And who knows, they may even have a new, updated iPhone come out the same time.

michaelblack.com

So I was working on getting some of my finances situated today and I decided that I needed to make certain my no longer used domain of michaelblack.com didn't accidentally expire and someone else take it from me.

I then remembered about this occasionally used blog space of mine and figured, "Hey, why don't I forward it to here instead of a dead page with nothing on it?" So here it is! michaelblack.com is officially back! Not that the one or two readers out there even knew it existed.

I started an opera related site over 10 years ago. Around that time, I registered my name. Remember, back then the internet was still a fairly new phenomenon with the general public. Try getting a common name now with a .com attachment! Anyway, I operated the site heavily for about four or five years. Gradually, I lost interest and it slowly died, so to speak. So now it is back and I can't officially say whether or not it will get anymore active than what this blog is already.