William Reardon’s Blog

I’m somewhat convinced that anytime I have a vacation planned, the problems and complexity of my life rise exponentially towards infinity as (time to vacation) approaches zero. Some of it is self-fulfilling: my vacations tend to be home with family. Family & drama tend to go together. This time it’s a bit more so: thinking of putting in an offer to buy a place, various irons in the fire at work heating up to varying extents, and, of course, the ladies of Pasadena demand attention. (It’s my jig… Drives the girls crazy.)

Note, however, I will shortly take time out of my schedule to mock Google.

Such is my dedication to you fuckers my fans.

Khayman tipped me to Wil Shipley’s blog, in particular his WWDC talk. This guy is awesome! His talk is terrific, but he also did a great job articulating my view on piracy.

In a nutshell: it doesn’t matter much. Who steals most software? The people who couldn’t afford to buy it in the first place. If people can pay, they generally will.

This is certainly true of myself. In my poor, college years, I certainly played more games than I actually paid for. And while I created a really, really neat movie of a sphere moving down a plank of window. (With multiple lighting sources, and a reflective surface to show the cube it passed. So it took 68 hours to render. So what? I was a senior tutor at the computer lab. I just hung a “this computer is broken sign” on the computer & turned of the monitor for a few days.) Yet I never paid the $3,000 that InfiniD was charging back then.

Should I feel bad? I don’t think so. These days it’s more common that I buy game that I end up playing little or not at all. For much the same reasons that Wil cites, I want to support the things I like so I see more of them. I don’t think there’s any pirated software on any of my computers at all. Heck, even my copy of Office is legit. (Having a brother at Microsoft helped on that one. ;-)

I can’t tell you why this is so enjoyable. If I could, I suppose I could tell you a lot about the mind of mankind.

Discovery Channel is running a program on the Greatest American. Out of , five remain for an American Idol style vote of who will be number one.

Here are the candidates in alphabetical order:

Benjamin Franklin
Martin Luther King Jr.
Abraham Lincoln
Ronald Reagan
George Washington

My top pick? Nope, not Reagan. In fact here’s how I’d rank them:

Benjamin Franklin
Abraham Lincoln
George Washington
Martin Luther King Jr.
Ronald Reagan

Yep, Benjamin Franklin would be my #1. There simply wouldn’t be a United States without him.

How would you rank them?

Is it me, or is the Make Blog the new Slashdot?

This is one the fundamental problems with the Constitution as a “living document.” While everyone (well, maybe not the Libertarians) sees the value of emiment domain for the construction of things such as roads, it’s pretty obvious our founding fathers weren’t thinking you could demolish someone’s house to build an office building.

It baffles me how the Right continues to be painted as puppets of corporations, with the implication that the Left somehow is less so. E.g., Bush’s energy task force was painted as satan for getting input from Enron, yet almost no mention of Clinton’s having done the same thing.

Add to the list this ruling.

For some reason I woke up at 7:30 this morning. Unusually, my room was on the warm side of things, making it hard to fall back asleep, so I figured might as well get up, get showered & dressed, and head into work. Best of all, I get to pull a Khayman and walk into work. Fellow Republicans, have no fear — I’ll leave the car idling for a half hour or so when I get home to keep the smog count up.

Two thumbs up.

If you liked the first Batman movie, you’ll like this one. Christian Bale does a great job as the caped crusader. Two minor nitpicks, but overall really good. Not good enough that I’m going to shave a bat into my head again, but that probably has something more to do with my age than the quality of the film.

Walking to lunch, I plugged my headphones into my iPod and set off. Returning home, I took the headphones out & plugged my iPod into my stereo. In a short while, I’ll hop in my car to head to the westside to see Batman returns with friends. Unlike Craig, I can’t use my iPod & car stereo together, so I use a collection of burned CDs of what’s on my iPod instead.

Walking back from lunch, I wondered why I had to do all that. The better experience would be keeping my iPod where it was, in pocket, through-out the day. As I moved about, from headphones to home to car, it automatically connected to the appropriate devices, even continuing to play the song in progress amongst the various devices. New music is automatically to added to my iPod and suddenly now that one song is available everywhere I go.

You wouldn’t think it would that hard. Some simple bluetooth communications, initial registration of devices you want to allow to automatically connect. Modules and adapters could be sold as add-ons for stereos, both home & car, until they started become standard options. I’m surprised Rio, etc. haven’t done this yet as product differentiators.