Rock and Roll, the Cola Wars, I can't take it anymore

I am a Mountain Dew drinker. Unfortunately I drink it in very large quantities, can't seem to stop from drinking it, and do not have an acceptable soft-drink substitute. I have watched with dismay over the years though as more and more places have become exclusively Coke.

In college, I watched as all 3 large Iowa public Universities switched to be exclusively Coke. This was accomplished by Coke bringing in new machines, doubling the cut the Universities received, and providing athletic sponsorship. I was not happy.

Subway has always had what I considered to be the best Mountain Dew from a fountain machine anywhere. I went to one this past week and found they were now Coke. Company mandate. I found out that Coke had swung this deal by buying Subway all of those fancy sub toasting machines that they now feature. I'm sure they threw in some additional percentages as well.

Later that same week, I visited Wendy's only to find that they too were now on the Coke bandwagon. This was expected though, as we had noticed prior that when you ordered a Pepsi product, it actually showed up as a corresponding Coke product on the screen. Obviously their software was updated before they could roll out the new machines.

So, the net effect is I can't go to any fast food burger joint, my favorite mainstream sub shop, or my alma mater and find anything to satisfy my addiction. Pepsi just seems to continue allowing Coke to walk all over them. Very annoying on one hand, but maybe if it disappears entirely I can finally break my habit.

The Children! Won't somebody think of the children?

This is ridiculous. I hate anytime laws or rules are overused. It is a slippery slope and one that is not easily turned around. I'm also getting tired of things constantly being outlawed or removed from schools or businesses because there is an ever so slight chance that something bad might happen.

News flash - it's life, there is always a chance something bad will happen. You mitigate the very large risks, and the rest you just have to address as best you can. This is an example of how not to do it:

Snack Ban
Thursday, February 17, 2005, 6:05:04 PM

By Dave Franzman
KCRG-TV9 News

Video
(Cedar Rapids – KCRG) --The fear of meth contamination is one reason
behind a proposed school policy change in Mt. Pleasant.

School administrators say they want parents or students to bring only
packaged snacks or treats to share in a classroom. The reason is
homemade goodies could come in contact with residue from meth-making
operations.

School officials say there is no case they know of in which food
brought into Mt. Pleasant schools contained any meth contamination.
However, there was a scare at the middle school some years ago
involving food poisoning.

Administrators say food safety was the overriding concern...and the
meth contamination issue was just a part of it.

Mt. Pleasant superintendent John Roederer will recommend the homemade
snack ban to the school board next month. If passed, it would become
school policy next fall. Parents and students are being urged to bring
only packaged food items in the meantime.

Source: http://www.kcrg.com/article.aspx?art_id=95689

Why not ban clothes, because they too might have come in contact with Joe Bob's rolling meth lab down the street? Get rid of all food, because even prepackaged (such as peanut butter) might contains peanuts which might cause little Billy to puff up like Kirstie Alley.

Ahhhhh, the stupidity has hurt my head. Is it too early in the morning for Tequila?

"I thought you were going to tell me what a bad eugoogalizer I am"

Okay, tonight I got to learn about the latest, pointless excercises in handcuffing used by the large media producers of the world.

DVD's have been copy-protected in several pathetic ways for years. Region-coding (VERY pathetic and just plain stupid), CSS (broken almost immediately by CSS Jon) and others. This was of interest because some people still believe in the concept of fair-use. I personally believe in this very much. I think I should be able to dump my DVD's to a hard drive and watch them that way if I choose. I should also be able to make backups to disc in case my originals get destroyed by kids, cats, kitchen appliances (you don't usually see that kind of behavior though ;-) ), etc.

There are various free tools out there to accomplish exactly this. DVDShrink being my absolute favorite. In fact, it is one of my favorite software applications period. It has a fantastic UI, and just simply does the task it is intended for with ease. These are topics for another entire blog.

However, tonight I found myself in posession of a disc that no longer worked. "The Forgotten", a great movie I already paid $17 to see in the theater. DVDShrink would get to about 18% and die. Thus I began a google search to get the lowdown.

Turns out the spawns of satan (the movie distributors) have been at work on new techniques. These include RE2, an upgraded region encoding, and ARCOS - yet, another fine bastardization of technology by Sony. I couldn't find any good defintions on ARCOS, but I did find many references stating that "The Forgotten" most definately used that protection. So, I did a search for a way around it, and found a slick little program named DVD43free. It strips away the stupid protections through a small shim, allowing any programs reading the drive to see it as completely unprotected. Thus, DVDShrink was now perfectly happy to create a backup.

I will now watch the movie in a few nights when I actually have the free time, and then delete the image. Go to hell MPAA, I'm keeping my fair-use.

Hi. I"m dumb, and I'm in marketing. Shower me with money and praise.

I'm getting a mac mini soon, and thus I'm interested in hearing about any accessories that might be coming. However, this link from suckdot just seemed silly to me.

My favorite is:

"The mini Skirt is a 3/4” thick flame-polished acrylic pedestal the size of the mini that gives it an even classier look."

Yeah, just like body cladding made GM's look better for years, or blue LED"s really give air valves on tires something special. Isn't a large part of the appeal of the mac mini its pure simplicity and sleek design?

Presenting - the dumbest idea ever.
Wait for it... Wait for it...beer with something. That's exactly what the ad for new BudExtra says. It's the new beer with caffeine and ginsing, and I presume crack cocaine added. I can just picture the board meeting: "Dude, beer is kind of a downer. Let's toss some uppers into it. Yeah, then it'll just fusker with people's heads and fill their body with crap it doesn't need. Sweet!" If you want to check out this moronic idea, go here.



Finally, an actually really good idea to prove that all new products are not thought up by evil. FHM this month had a shot of a product called ADS Instant Music. This is a fantastic device, I can see it being especially useful for someone's parents with a large record/8-track/cassette collection. Take your existing media and player, hook it into this device rather than a receiver, and then via USB the music is transferred to one of 3 compressed music formats. All of this from a device costing $60. Very cool. Now, add the ability to output in uncompressed WAV format, and you've probably made a customer out of me as well.

That's all for now.

Me Fail English? That's unpossible.

Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft...how we love to poke at you with
sharp sticks. This one takes the cake though as both the funniest and
dumbest thing I have seen on a computer in quite some time.

I use Microsoft SourceSafe for some of my development at work (which
really, really sucks). I went to use it the other day and it was
uninstalled from my PC. That seemed unusual since I didn't remember
purposefully doing it. Yesterday I ended up needing it, so I
reinstalled.

I also happen to have the Microsoft AntiSpyware beta running on my PC.
So far it has been fantastic, working much better than other
anti-spyware programs. Overnight, it detected that I had 1 instance
of spyware. This seemed unusual to me, since I only use Firefox now,
and I hadn't gone anywhere unusual. The program was SystemSpy or
something similar, and was supposedly a keylogger. AntiSpyware said
that I should immediately remove it, so I let it go ahead.

I then watched as it proceeded to blow away my SourceSafe
installation. Now, I knew how it had been uninstalled originally.
I had been installing from an ISO of version 6.0d downloaded straight
from MSDN, but I borrowed someone else's copy just to make sure mine
didn't have a trojan or something. It didn't, the other version
showed up as Spyware as well.

Okay, let's recap. Microsoft's AntiSpyware program removed
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe. As best I can tell, this is
because source safe has executables and folders named SS which is
similar to how SystemSpy may appear.

I can't help wonder if some user didn't come up with this either
maliciously or through unknown stupdity, and then Microsoft just
rolled it into a definition update.

The Ocho

Well, I have learned a few interesting things over the last few days.

First, lurking in the Fazed slorums TMI thread can be bad for your
health. It turns out there are sometimes worse things than Man
Chickens.

Second, open source is a wonderful thing. No, I didn't really just
learn this. I have been a strong believer in the open source movement
for quite some time. Especially now that my work and my beliefs have
cooincided a bit with my work shifting to Linux. However, I got yet
another reminder the other night, and this time it was on Windows.

Some time ago (October or so of last year) I picked up a low-cost TV
tuner/capture card for my PC. It is a Hauppage WinTV-GO PCI. I got
it for $20 or so from some online company.

I tried hooking it up immediately only to find that the drivers I
found didn't work. Hours of digging through Hauppage's site led me to
other drivers, but they all sucked and hadn't been updated in 2 years.
I finally got one to somewhat work, and then fired up their
horrendous WinTV application. I occaisionally got some channels to
come in, with interference, if I was lucky. Then, it just stopped
recognizing the driver altogether.

I was fed up with this because I had read this card was actually
decent. So, I hopped on over to videohelp.com. As usual the site was
full of good information. After searching for my card, I found that
many people were using an open source Windows WDM driver for the BT848
chipset on my card. I hopped on over to btwincap.sourceforge.net and
downloaded the drivers.

They Rock!!! Perfect quality and stable as all get out. I also
grabbed DScaler and VirtualVCR. I haven't gotten DScaler to work yet,
but VirtualVCR works fantastic for both watching TV and capture.
Combined with a scheduler frontend written by someone else, I am now
able to record TV at will. No guide data yet, but my mac mini has not
yet entered the picture either.

I need to start capturing VHS tapes to computer again. I am going to
try using this card, rather than my mini DV cam and firewire this
time. Sounds like from everything I read that it will be a snap, and
very high quality.