Published on
April 28, 2005 in
General.
Saw this Slashdot post. A student at CMU made a website parodying the Wal-Mart Foundation (a thinly veiled attempt to improve the parent corp’s public image through small scattered donations) for a class on “Parasitic Media”. Guess Wal-Mart didn’t take too kindly to how they were portrayed, so they whipped out that horrendous piece of legeslation, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA’s a vague wording allows large corporations with lots of cash to easily threaten things they don’t like. Sounds a bit like the RIAA going after Diamond Multimedia when they first released the RIO portable MP3 player (first MP3 player backed by a major corporation). I wrote a brief bit about it back when I was an undergrad taking a course on ethics in engineering (surprisingly enough, it’s still available here on the course website).
Wonder if the Feds will go after mypyramid.org (a spoof Jeff pointed out yesterday parodying the FDA’s revamp of the food pyramid at mypyramid.gov)
Talked about this earlier. Managed to take some more pictures today and actually load them onto my computer (as opposed to deleting them accidently again. In addition to Optimus Prime, there were several milk carton people (only took a picture of one, but may go back for more later), a giant fork (didn’t take a picture because I wasn’t as enthralled by it, and it looked like it was slightly broken), a burning foosball player, and a really bizarre one involving a giant beetle pushing a dirt clod with a human fetus inside. Go check out the pictures!
Oh, and it looks like the course is Art 305: Art for Public Places.
Looks like the trailer for Joss Whedon’s Serenity (based on the series Firefly) is finally online! Looks pretty tight. How am I gonna make it till September 30th when it’s finally released? Makes me want to go back and rewatch the show again.
Finally got around to loading up some of my older kitty pics that were on my other camera. They start off with Spooky attacking Space Chicken when he was a little bitty kitten, and moves on to the cats playing with each other and a box.
On a related note, I did take my camera in to work today, and I did take pictures of the cardboard sculptures in Beckman. Unfortunately, when I went to download them onto my computer I accidently deleted them instead of downloading them (bit of a usability issue with
Picasa IMHO). Guess I’ll have to go take some more tomorrow.
So there’s this art class on campus that does fairly large sculptures out of cardboard. At the end of the semester, the students showcase their work out on the quad and apparently other places on campus. Saw the coolest (read: geekiest) one today in the main atrium/lobby in Beckman… a 10 foot tall Optimus Prime!!! That thing rules! I’m gonna have to try to remember to bring a camera with me tomorrow to document it. 
Wish the course had a website documenting student projects. There have been all sorts of cool ones in the past, like giant spiders.
Published on
April 17, 2005 in
Geek.
So apparently GCC4 should be released before too long. Release candidates are out and release date is set for some time in April. Recently found out Fedora Core 4 will include it, which made me a little wary of trying it out (seems like it took a while for the GCC3 release to settle down and for apps to fix compatibility issues). Weird thing is, I was looking through a feature comparison for OS X (Tiger.4 vs Panther.3 vs Jaguar.2) and noticed that the upcoming Tiger release will also rely on GCC4. While I realize Apple’s undoubtably made all sorts of changes (included in the apple-local-200502-branch no less), I’m a little surprised they’re quite so bleeding edge. I mean GCC4 hasn’t hit final release status yet and I know Tiger has already gone gold and had it’s release date set. Wonder how long it’ll be before a 10.4.1 patch is released?
Looks like the Orange and Blue Observer (OBO) are at it again. When I went to drop off my Rentertainment DVDs today, I couldn’t help but notice the sidewalk chalk ads everywhere for a 9mm raffle being held today on the Quad. Guess their AK-47 raffle went well enough that they decided to make some more money (and presumably make some sort of statement at the same time).
Published on
April 12, 2005 in
Geek.
Saw this post at slashdot. Looks like the next release of OS X, 10.4 to be exact, will be released on April 29th. Supposed to be a pretty hefty update.
Dropped Merry off at the vet this morning for spaying (finally). Leaving her there all alone (overnight no less) really pulled at my heartstrings. 
I’m such a softie. I don’t know how parents manage to drop their kids off at school for the first time.
On a related note, I finally got around to uploading some more kitty pictures. Been having hardware problems with my CompactFlash reader (took forever to get it to mount, took forever to get a directory listing, took forever to transfer the files, and some of the files were corrupted by the time they got to my computer). Anyway, think I’ve got some more pictures on my other camera, so hopefully I can get some of those uploaded before long too. Oh, and buy a replacement flash reader at some point too.
Published on
April 7, 2005 in
General.
Apparently the comic Mitch Hedberg died Wednesday, March 30th, 2005. Cause of death was heart failure.
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