Life-sized likenesses of Guard members ease separation pains

BANGOR — Lt. Col. Randall Holbrook travels just about
everywhere with his wife Mary and their two sons, Justin, 14, and
Logan, 5.

He’s quietly in the background on family outings to the
grocery store, to restaurants, camping, even on Mary’s most
recent visit to her gynecologist. [Read]

This is a joke right? Please tell me it is, please! This has got to be the creepiest thing I have ever heard of. ‘Children of the corn’ type creepy! Can you imagine kids walking around with a life size cutout of their parent(s).

Hey, maybe they can start using this for divorced parent(s) as well.

Could Oboe be the answer?

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I remember this music locker service from MP3tunes but I don’t recall why I didn’t fall all head over heels for it earlier. Anyways, now they have a 40 bucks a year plan that will let me store and stream unlimited music. I have a huge collection, and a couple of backups. And yet, I am always nervous that maybe I don’t have enough backups. Maybe this will be just the thing. Of course, there is nothing to guarantee that they won’t loose my music, but they are proably all setup for hardward failures and such.

BTW, I am proud to say that my collection is 100% legit. I have ripped all my disks (thanks to Columbia House and stupid spending habits, I have lots of em) and I was a one of those lucky members of eMusic when they had an unlimited download policy. I got a lot of stuff from them before they introduced that download cap.

We’ve known this about computer chips, memory, etc. …

… but even coffee and groceries!? Check it out:

‘Product sabotage’ helps consumers

How Google made me e-sloppy and may cost me my e-sanity

In the goog old days of limited free online email space, one learnt quickly how to sift thorough all your post-spam filtering email and keep only what you really really need, and delete everything else. Alien as it may sound today, there where actually times when the net contents of all my folders would be 0, albeit briefly.

And this habit would spill over to your work email in Outlook with corporate hosting and unlimited space.

Sure, you can still do that with GMail and similar multi-gig services. But over time, little by little, these services erode that disciple and today, I suddenly find that I have 1000s of archived email messages that I can’t get rid off. See, in the older process, there were support systems which handled the job of archive the important information. Word docs with codes and numbers, print or pdf files of important conversations, etc. Now, everything is just one exquistely searchable lump of data.

And its a one-way street. I can never hope to sit down and clean everything up; its too time consuming and costly (since time = money). Besides, you look at that percentage used number at the bottom and tell yourself you still have enough playing room and decide to do it later. At most, I manage to clean up the first 2 or 3 pages of the inbox.

And the tags! Pinhead would love ‘em! What wonderously painful little things they are. You start out with a few basic ones, and then you decide to break them down a bit more and you go back and redo the ones already there, and Google then allows you to filter and tag retroactively, so you go back and do some more and then some more. Until it becomes a fiendish obession and you are stuck in a death spiral of an ever more finely tweaked tagging structure. I’m not there yet, but its just a matter of time, what with the obsessive complusive behaviour and the mood medication. On the other hand, I am obsessively compulsively lazy; so that may actually prevent me from falling into the abyss.

But I know now that I stand at the edge of insanity; for when I look down into my email, it looks back up at me!

Ready To Assemble

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As opposed to “not ready to assemble” where they mail you the ore, coal and a cow and you build your own metal framed leather office chair.

Expensive stand alone DVD Player

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WTF! “No need to buy an expensive stand-alone DVD player. Who are these people who can afford TVs, laptops, DVDs, a roof over your head and even electricity but cannot afford an “expensive stand-alone DVD player”?

‘My Favourites’ playlist

Here is my current hand picked ‘My Favourites’ list from iTunes:

• Happy People [Album Version with DJ Skit] R Kelly  Happy People – U Saved Me  
• Europa (Earths Cry Heavens Smile) [Album Version] Santana  The Essential Santana
• Hey Nineteen Steely Dan  A Decade of Steely Dan
• Teach Me Tonight Tito Puente Gene DePaul/Sammy Cahn Golden Latin Jazz All Stars: In Session 
• Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)/Album Version Marvin Gaye  Gold  
• Let’s Get It On/Album Version Marvin Gaye  Gold  
• What’s Going On Marvin Gaye  Greatest Hits  
• Sexual Healing [1982] Marvin Gaye David Ritz/Marvin Gaye/Odell Brown Soul Train: Hall of Fame, 20th Anniversary  
• Every Kinda People/Remix Robert Palmer  Best of Both Worlds: The Robert Palmer Anthology (1974-2001)  
• Every Kinda People Robert Palmer Andy Fraser Addictions, Vol. 1  
• Hello The Cat Empire  The Cat Empire  
• Welcome to the Jungle Guns N’ Roses Axl Rose/Duff “Rose” McKagan/Izzy Stradlin/Slash/Steven Adler Greatest Hits  

Yeah it does look like I went overboard with Marvin Gaye. Oh well, its my list and I’m sticking to it!

 

Road

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Picture taken on Jan 27th 2006 somewhere in New Jersey.

Some interesting reading

Check out this recent post on Boing Boing, the books mentioned seem like some interesting reading. I’m off to the bookshop now.

Something similar

My ex-boss and his wife would do something similar. They cancelled my benefits and instead took vacations and bought themselves fancy toys.