PlasticBoy

The album of the week is Guided By Voices’ Half Smiles of the Decomposed.

I’ve finally gotten around to checking out Flickr and it’s very promising. It actually has everything I’ve been looking for in a photo site. The one thing all of the others seemed to be missing was the ability to view your photos at full resolution. I’ve made a few of my photos public, if you know me and want an invite to see the rest of them, drop me a line.

Grokster has defeated MGM’s appeal and peer-to-peer filesharing now has a bit more legal standing. EFF has a nice summary of the decision.

More Morning Edition: a nice segment on the 30th birthday of Dungeons & Dragons.

The album of the week is Future Soundtrack for America. I recommend buying a copy to benefit MoveOn.

Morning Edition had a great segment today on the link between obesity and income.

The album of the week is the Beta Band’s Heroes to Zeros.

NYTimes on the Pixies reunion tour.

It wasn’t just the shows in smaller venues that sold so briskly; more than 50,000 tickets were snapped up for the Pixies’ day at the Coachella festival, and theaters around the United States have quickly sold out for multiple dates. The Pixies were to perform at the New York stop of the Lollapalooza Festival this month, which had already sold 11,000 tickets when the entire tour was canceled. Instead, they will have New York dates on Dec. 12 and 13 at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Meanwhile, the company DiscLive has been offering instant live recordings of every concert by the reunited group. Those CD’s, in numbered limited editions of 1,000 or 2,000, are selling out, too, and turning into instant collectors’ items available for handsome mark-up on eBay.

WashPost has a lengthy profile of the new head of the Humane Society of the United States who, much to his critics’ horror, actually believes in animal rights.

You can vote on MoveOn PAC’s Errol Morris-directed Real People anti-Bush ads. The winners will be run during the Republican National Convention.

A new study finds that going vegan is easy.

To investigate how people would cope with a switch to an all-vegan diet, Barnard and his team asked half of 64 overweight women to try a low-fat form of the diet — one that excluded all animal products, nuts, avocados and other fatty fare — for 14 weeks. The rest of the women ate a standard low-fat diet that included animal products.

There was[sic] no limits placed on calories or portion size, and people could eat allowed desserts as often as they liked. Vegan participants also took a supplement of vitamin B-12, which is naturally found in animal products…

After 14 weeks, 93 percent of vegan eaters said the diet was good, moderately good or extremely good, and 79 percent rated the diet as “acceptable.” Almost 90 percent said they planned to continue the diet after the experiment, the authors report in the Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation.

New York Metro has a conversation between Norman Mailer and his son, John Buffalo Mailer.

The real story was in the faces. All those faces on the Bush team. What you saw was the spiritual emptiness of those people. Bush has one of the emptiest faces in America. He looks to have no more depth than spit on a rock. It could be that the most incisive personal crime committed by George Bush is that he probably never said to himself, “I don’t deserve to be president.” You just can’t trust a man who’s never been embarrassed by himself. The vanity of George W. stands out with every smirk. He literally cannot control that vanity. It seeps out of every movement of his lips, it squeezes through every tight-lipped grimace. Every grin is a study in smugsmanship.

Jon Udell has posted a good hunk of Red Hat VP Michael Tiemann’s talk at OSCON on the future of Fedora. This makes me feel even better about Fedora. Red Hat seems to have gotten just about everything right with Fedora. It’s more Free than SUSE and Mandrake, has a reasonable release schedule unlike Debian and Slackware, and the repository system provides a huge amount of easy to install software. Now, if only they could get that CVS server up.

The album of the week is The Orb’s Bicycles & Tricycles.

HP is shipping laptops pre-loaded with SUSE Linux 9.1. Go HP!