It’s kind of interesting when separate things rub together, and funny how there is no public condemnation of western State sponsored violence.
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Archive for the ‘rants’ Category
Condemn
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009Modern Art
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
Really? #2
Friday, February 13th, 2009So last night, in utter frustration about the broken key on the new Macbook Pro, I’m finally starting to gaze into what seems to be the infinite depth of Apple’s technical support the black hole.
Went back to the Apple store last night and, after being helped by one of the concierges there, had a dickish genius at the “Moron Bar” tell me that this type of damage is NOT covered by the warranty, the reason: You would need ‘excessive’ force to do this type of damage. This is a 1 week old computer don’t forget, and everyone knows that any rational human being who has spent more than $1,000.00 on some laptop would type with a hammer for the first week. There is NO possible way that 1 key out of the gizillion keys they manufacture is defective right? And how much is excessive force anyways? 1 psi? 10? 500?
Sam, the genius there, of course must have tried to jam the key in or something (I don’t know what he did because he was out back) but insured that the hooks, which were cracked, are now fully broken. This means that now I’m not able to put it in the keyboard and have it stay for more than 1 click (which it did before).
Update 021409: Finally, resolution… The girls and guys at the 14th street Apple store finally pulled it through. After a week of much frustration with the absurdity of the issue, you won’t hear about it again. Until the next key breaks that is…
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Really?
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
That quick? My old Dell lasted 4 years without a hitch. 1 week and the MacBook Pro has already begun to fall apart… (singing the alphabet, as per the previous post).
Update 021209 9:40 am: I just got in from the Apple store @ 59th Street. I was told I basically had to leave the laptop in for repair, 5 – 7 days…FOR A BROKEN KEY! So far I’ve spent 1 hour on this, we’ll see how much longer this takes.
Repeat with me: this will be the first and last Apple computer I will ever purchase.
Update 021209 1:06 pm: Got off the phone with someone at Apple Support…No dice. Apparently the only option is to either send it back to Apple or take it in to the store/service providers for repair. Am I crazy or is this just insanely stupid? How about just mailing me the damn keycap? I SWEAR I’ll mail the broken one back! This was pretty fast, so it took about 15 mins total.
Update 021209 3:42 pm: Just came back from Tekserve…had a very helpful guy help me out, but once again, no dice. Well, he did give me a (different semicolon) key from a different (older) computer, so I could definitely put it in its place, but that seems like so reasonable after shelling a chunk of change on this thing doesn’t it? I guess I’ll have to take it in, have it’s keyboard be fully replaced and be without a computer for a whole week.
Pff.
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All Points West
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
Saturday we made it to Liberty State Park in N.J. for the All Points West festival. The only reason for going on Saturday, for me, was to see Radiohead. Chromeo was also up in there in the list, but playing at 2 pm, there was no way I was going to make it.
Radiohead was of course incredible. They played 2+hours and had 2 encores. The visuals were pretty nice: two large screens as well as what seemed to me (from my spot) like strands of fiber optics hanging and creating simple patterns. The screens had 6 different views of the stage and every now and then some interesting patterns.
Some pics after the jump. Some clips coming up in a few days.
(more…)
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Raise Your Hand
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008If you’ve been a ‘victim of credit fraud’. Yay!!! (Hate the whole phrase by the way).
Last night I received an email stating that my credit score had changed (I had setup an alarm that notified me, due to another incident…) and voila, there went my credit score.
Today I had the pleasure of spending most of my morning trying to sort this thing out, and it seems like it might be easier than I thought. To make a long story short, some knucklehead used some of my info to open a cell-phone account under my name somewhere in Philly, and not pay the bills of course…
So, you get someone’s info and the best thing you can come up with is to get a cell phone and start, I don’t know, calling and texting hotlines or whatever? The idiocy of the end itself sort of defeats the purpose of the entire thing. I mean, if you’re already going to do something stupid, wouldn’t you want to just go all the way through and get something interesting out of it?
Pfff
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Fighting Fire with Fire
Thursday, April 24th, 2008It is really hard to understand what is going on lately, but you have to admire the stupidity -or insanity might be a more precise term – of some people.
Eric Thompson, the owner of a company that sold firearm merchandise to both the Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois shooter is, as a good will gesture, selling his products at cost for two weeks so “law abiding citizens” can buy them to prevent other tragedies. As he makes it clear, he “want(s) to help people save lives”.
“Initially, I wanted this to be an offer for college students,” he said. “But there’s no real way to determine whether someone is a college student … so we opened it up to any legal American.” Because it is so much easier to recognize a law abiding legal American than a card carrying student…
It only makes perfect sense to have everyone in school is carrying a gun right? That way you’ll never ever see another mass shooting be carried all the way through; instead, you’ll just see a bunch of little shootings every day over moronic things. Professors should be allowed to carry semi-automatic weapons (you have to keep maintain the hierarchy somehow).
Read the CNN article here.
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Temporarily permanent
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008Nothing says “temporary stay” like the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, the U.S.’s largest diplomatic compound anywhere in the world, which is now ready.
“It’s been a difficult few weeks, rockets are bouncing off your buildings, and maintaining focus can be an occasional challenge,” (ambassador) Crocker said…
Read the CNN article here.
Read my previous entry here.
via [archinect]
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Why Gas Prices are Crazy
Saturday, March 29th, 2008As complete a breakdown on the economics of gas from a pump upstate. With a nice tag included.
Click on the image for a larger version or go after the jump below to see the transcription.
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Say what Mr. Bush?
Saturday, January 12th, 2008“For Mr. Bush, Friday was an emotional day of tourism at sights special to Jews and Christians. He visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. At least twice, Mr. Bush had tears in his eyes, said Avner Shalev, the chairman of the museum.
At one point Mr. Bush stopped before aerial photos of the Auschwitz death camp taken by American planes during World War II, and asked Ms. Rice why the American military did not bomb the camp. “We should have bombed it,” he told her, Mr. Shalev told reporters later.” the NYT article reads (my emphasis).
Never mind the thousands of prisoners…
Read the NYT article here.
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U.S. vetoes
Saturday, January 12th, 2008
After reading the news about Bush’s recent visit to Israel and the West Bank (obviously there was no mention of Gaza) and what according to the press might have been some of the strongest statements to date on the need for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians(…) I couldn’t help but wonder what the record (the U.N record that is) shows. A funny pattern of vetoes comes up dating from 1995, having almost every veto being from the U.S. against Palestine. This of course leads me to believe that this time around he REALLY wants peace. Right?
Click on the image above for a higher res version or read this fantastic chart of total UN vetoes here.
Read the BBC article here.
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The cusp of law?
Thursday, January 10th, 2008Can you sue your drug dealer for selling you a substance that might be addictive, toxic and harmful, in other words, drugs?
It seems like in Canada you can. Sandra Bergen sued her drug dealer -Clinton Davey- for selling her crystal meth, which, after causing her a heart attack (do I hear O.D’ing?) sent her to a coma for 11 days. According to the article, “Ms Bergen said Clinton Davey had known the drug was highly addictive and dangerous but sold it to make money” and she continues that he “knew the drug was highly addictive” and that his dealing was not only “for the purpose of making money but was also for the purpose of intentionally inflicting physical and mental suffering” on her.
Is this the cusp of civility or of idiocy? In my mind, it seems like jumping off a window because your boss told you to do so would fall under the same category. You are assuming a risk for consuming an illegal substance (yes, that means that its quality cannot be guaranteed, because it isn’t regulated!). It is also a bit difficult to believe that she didn’t know about crystal meth’s addictiveness, maybe Googling it could have given her some insight, but perhaps she doesn’t know about Google either…
Read the BBC news article here.
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Is the future Round (smooth) or Square (straight)?
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007Recently, I’ve entered this discussion with a few of my friends and colleagues, after it came up in a conversation after our final review at Pratt.
Is the future round or square?
Nowadays, it seems like the future is turning rounder, smoother and more NURBS-like (or Subdivision-surfaces-like) than before. Perhaps it’s that part of the cycle where everything becomes smoothed -which seems to be somewhere about every 10 years or so- but for some reason it seems like this time around is not just some fluctuation but instead is here to stay. So, where is the square future?
Most of the work being produced at the schools right now (Columbia, Pratt, DRL, etc) seems to be getting smoother – I’m trying not to use the word blobby in here – the result not only of the processes of generation which aren’t inherently smooth but typically default to 3rd degree surfaces.
I will continue building up with this post, right now this is a very incomplete rambling.
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Bahhhseball
Thursday, December 13th, 2007Everyone is juiced, so? Who watches that sport anyways?
This instead is more interesting: The McLaren team has been fined £50m having in their possession a whooping 780 page Ferrari document, after loosing their constructors’ points in September for information handed to them by a Ferrari spy(?!?!). Spies in sports… sigh.
I guess this would be the equivalent of steroids in motor sports.
Read the BBC article here.
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C.I.A.’s waterboarding videos
Sunday, December 9th, 2007
Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
It’s of course all over the press, so I’m not really going to comment on it. But in case you actually haven’t read what these people (Michael Hayden et al) use for excuses, read this excerpt from The Guardian’s article:
“The tapes posed a serious security risk,” the CIA’s director, Michael Hayden, told agency employees in a statement yesterday. “Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the programme, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al-Qaida and its sympathisers.”
Really? So the destruction of tapes which contain footage of an interrogation technique which cannot be admitted nor denied -because it would actually qualify as torture- is for the protection of the actual interrogators. Not because it *might* be torture.
Read The Guardian’s full article here.
BBC’s coverage here.
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iDiots
Friday, June 29th, 2007Waiting for the iPhone…
zzzzzzz
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Applewood Pond Jungle
Friday, June 1st, 2007
We went to visit our recently acquired land upstate from Saturday to Sunday. Every time we see it it just looks like a completely different place. The first time we saw it was winter, fairly cold but not much snow. The second time it was a snow-covered world (imagine Star Wars’ ice planet). Two weeks ago, the place looked pretty full and lush, it seemed like some work would be needed but definitely nothing out of the ordinary. Last weekend we just got back from our latest visit and the place was a jungle. Imagine Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo… (more…)
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Beat the Horse…Dead
Friday, March 30th, 2007I just wanted to quickly thank Coche for blazing this new trail, and allowing me to saddle up and get back on the horse after falling off almost two years ago.
Why take the reins now? Is this simply a carrot on a stick?
No, no, my trusty steads. There’s a very old Mexican proverb that I just found on the Internet. It says, “It is not enough for a man to know how to ride; he must know how to fall.†My roots are speaking to me. They watched me walk and trot. They know I can prance with airs above the ground and gallop like the wind.
My intentions are to feed this blog with only the finest hay. To extend its lunge line and cut it loose. To make this gelding into a stallion.
And as with the previous trail of tears (www.g-digit.com), I don’t expect everyone to follow. There will be broken hooves and apple picking (not of the fruit variety). It’s up to you to break us in. But as Winston Churchill once said (also recently found on Internet), “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.†Which outside part, I am unsure of, but I implore you to grab on and see where we go. It should serve as an oasis in the Arabian desert that is your life
But as they say, you can only lead a horse . . .
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Change this dang skin
Sunday, March 25th, 2007I just installed wordpress and it rocks, but I’ve got to change the skin… If only I weren’t a PHP dummy.
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