| |
 |
Thursday, December 04, 2003 |
Can't Fool All Of The People.
"Are you safer now, than you were three years ago? Thanks to President
Bush - you aren't. Heck, considering the resources and lives being used
to occupy Iraq, it could be argued that his policies have made
Americans less safe."... [Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid]
It seems to me that this question and variations on it are the key questions for the Democrats to be asking for 2004:
Are you better off financially than you were four years ago?
Are you less afraid of crime than you were four years ago?
Is the environment better off now than it was four years ago?
Is your or your child's school better now than it was four years ago?
Is your confience in your future greater than it was four years ago?
Are you more or less optimistic about your children's future than you were four years ago?
Do you know more or less about the workings of your government than you did four years ago?
7:45:02 PM Permalink
|
|
Hot Chile Peppers in the Blistering Sun
Several people have commented lately on Bit Torrent lately. I've just started using it over the last couple weeks, because it's a great source for Dylan concerts. I'm using the OS X Panther client,
and it works quite well, though it does seem to eat up a lot of cycles
on the machine and fill up my DSL pipe. The best general source of info
I know of on Bit Torrent is the wiki at http://wiki.etree.org/index.php.
In the past few days, I've downloaded three extraordinary Dylan concerts late last month in London. Though some statements about these shows have been a tad over the top,
they do show Bob at the top of his current form, with imaginative,
surprising setlists, and some fantastic singing. The singing is a
surprise for me because his voice earlier in the tour wasn't so hot.
But hearing him rip through Romance in Durango (first performance since 1976!), Jokerman, and Tough Mama really gets me where I live.
The Dylan concerts, as well as most of the other music you find in Bit
Torrent is in the Shorten, or .SHN format. Shorten is a way of
compressing music files into files smaller than WAV or AIFF format, but
without the loss of quality that's the price of MP3. Alas, the files
are larger than MP3 files, but mostly it's worth it. It's not difficult
to transform the files into MP3. Alas, support for Shorten on OS X is
not what it should be. You can't play them with iTunes or burn them
directly to CD (at least with iTunes or Toast 5.X; I haven't checked
Toast 6). I've been using Carbon Shorten
which has a GUI, but doesn't let you drag and drop files or decompress
a number of files to their original locations easily. I'm too busy
right now to dive into the command-line method of decompressing files, but I should probably do that. If anyone knows of other tools, please let me know.
1:25:16 PM Permalink
|
|
N.B.: This Story Is Not from Alabama. A Presque Isle, Maine middle school social studies teacher has sued his school district alleging that his and his students' First Amendment rights are being violated by a district-established curriculum that prevents teaching about non-Christian civilizations and religions. Gary Cole... [The Right Christians]
9:22:33 AM Permalink
|
|
© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
|
|
|
|
|
