Here is the video [11MB, MPEG] that was on NBC last night. Music star Kanye West decided to use his little amount of time on the program to spout about Iraq and how George Bush, “Doesn’t care about black people.” I’m sure that was news to Dr. Rice who by most estimates GW’s best friend. How selfish of West who should have helped the cause to raise money.

This video looks like a SNL skit (well SNL back when it was funny) and oddly enough even features former cast member Mike Myers. Kanye is an idiot and has never sounded more like one than in this clip.

My dad and brother are heading to the gulf coast tomorrow to meet some tractor trailers sent from my dad’s NGO in California. Food, water, diapers and no politics.

UPDATE: Kanye is a much bigger idiot than I was giving him credit for, here is a quote from him on the Ellen show today:

“A year ago I was on tour with USHER and we had a hurricane hit Florida and everybody was saying, ‘If this hurricane went to Louisiana, if it went to Mississippi, they wouldn’t be able to handle it.’ (That was) a year ago - and there was nothing done about it.”

Stunning statement there buddy. You’re right, no one knew that New Orleans was not equipped to handle a big storm until George Bush figured it out a year ago. Oh wait, it has been known since A. Baldwin Wood created the pump and levee system nearly 100 years ago. Why build a city on a fault line (*cough* LA)? Hindsight is 20/20.

Larry pointed me to a site that totally ripped my design at MobileTracker. The CSS even has my designer’s email addy in it!

Gizmodo linked them today, that’s how Larry found it, so I wrote the editor to ask him to not link in the future since the site is low on ethics. He was surprised and agreed.

I’ve emailed the site alerting them that this is a copyright violation and is absolutely not acceptable. We’ll see…

UPDATE: I found the site is owned by Dhiram Shah, who also runs PhoneyWorld.com.

I ordered a camera from Sony Style a while ago–it was a pre-order. Just now (3AM ET) I got an email saying my credit card was declined. My bank was recently bought out, so I have a new card and the number did change inbetween the time I ordered and now. I suppose they charge upon shipment which is nice, but it said my order was cancelled. Why not just ask for a new number?

There was a 1-800 number in the email, so I called it and went through the phone loop for home customer service. Sorry, call back in business hours! Too bad they sent the email about my order not working in non-business hours.

Urgh. I have a feeling I’ll be tossed to the back of the line now.

I’m a big fan of Digg, but as the site grows it is suffering from trolls. This can be seen by both the poor selection of links submitted (and more surprisingly also Dugg) and the intelligence in the comment sections. It is really reminding me of Slashdot.

Here’s a great example of comments that just serve no purpose. There are over a dozen people that mention the same feat was done on the show Mythbusters. Discounting the fact that Mythbusters only gets a few viewers each week (it’s hardly ever on rating charts and is very lucky if it pulls a 2 share), the mere fact that everyone felt the need to point this out again really rings of Slashdot. If you’re bored, here’s another example.

I think there should be a feature that lets readers filter out comments from commenters with no stories promoted to the front page. Much like the ratings at Slashdot allow you to filter out the riff raff. This isn’t going to curb poor links being submitted, but it will help the signal-to-noise ratio for registered users. Then again, there is already a ratings feature but it doesn’t seem to be used (unlike at /. where it’s what actually powers the filter).

Just an idea.

We have a bit of an ant problem in the house (it started about the same time as all the rain a few months ago, so I think they all headed for shelter–our shelter). The poison we have hasn’t really nuked them back to the stone age, so I set out tonight to identify the buggers. They are really really small as evidenced by my macro shot. The bumps on the background there are from a napkin and from what I have read the ants max out at 1/8th”.

Identifying a creature this small is insane–the difference between an Argentine and an Odorous is a Petiole with or without an errect node. Whatever that means. Here is the site I tried to use, but I think it would be best to have a scanning electron microscope before attempting to follow their tool.

I’m at the airport on the free WiFi (way to go Tampa!). While going through security today there was a woman in front of me that was arguing that the Delta rep had told her that she was allowed to bring on lighters, but only if she kept them in her purse (they are, as she said, prohibited in checked luggage). The security staff held back laughs and noted that in fact she has reversed the idea–lighters are banned in carry on luggage and can only be put below in checked luggage. But the passenger was convinced that it was only logical to allow lighters in the cabin but not under. I love people!

This press release from Qpass is laughable–the premise is that internet users are “shoplifting” ringtones by using the free preview links on websites and converting them to tones by themselves. I could harp on the fact it’s not shoplifting since there is no shop (and technically you probably already own the full product, but you are looking for a small slice of it to put on your phone), but I’ll let that slide.

A startling study conducted by Qpass of 100 leading U.S. and European digital content Websites revealed that more than one third of the sites are unsecured, allowing users to ’shoplift’ music tracks and download them as free ringtones. The extent of the problem in US may have already cost the mobile and music industries an estimated $40 million U.S. since the beginning of 2004, and a further $123 million U.S. by 2007, according to Qpass.

It doesn’t say how the dollar values were calculated, but I would assume those numbers have to be revenue not profit. As evidenced by the iTunes music store, rights fees can add up (Apple only makes a dime or so on each song) so if these numbers are revenue, the actual “damage” would be only ten percent or so.

However, the whole idea that there are legions of customers converting previews into real ringtones and transferring them to their phones is the real funny part–if they are smart enough to do the conversions, why would they poke around ringtone sites in the first place? Use existing music (even use the 30 second preview given away in the iTMS) which is probably at better quality. That’s what I do and it works great. My current ringtone is a catchy clip from the band Minus The Bear and everyone that hears it gets jealous.

So what’s the solution to these ringtone terrorists? DRM of course!

Preview content can be secured by using streaming, embedded pre-listening or the use of a DRM-protected file format.

With tools like Xingtone, just about anyone can make their own tone. That’s not a loss to the “ringtone industry”, that’s just being smart. The problem is that your “industry” is based entirely on selling very small segments of sounds your customers probably already own… And on top of that–for extremely high fees.

Bah.

I just downloaded the latest version of PHP Nuke to take a look at how the source has progressed (I haven’t done much with it since version 5.X which is what MacMerc still runs, though we’re going to switch to Drupal). Well, it hasn’t gotten any better (either in code quality or user experience). PHP Nuke may be the most bloated CMS ever. Look up feature creep in the dictionary and you’ll see a picture of Francisco Burzi in a PHP Nuke shirt. Amazing that it is still being actively developed.

I’m glad I wrote these guys off years ago!

So far I have loved having Verizon FiOS–it’s screaming fast and really stable. But over the past two days my IP address has changed twice (for a total of three addresses). Normally this isn’t too big of a problem, because it’s only the last set of numbers that changes, but I have seen every set change. The two addresses from the past day haven’t been anything alike.

This means it’s a huge pain for me to work on servers that control FTP authentication by IP. I called Verizon to see what was up (this is the first time I have noticed an IP change, and it happened twice in such a short time) and they had the balls to claim that it’s a feature. Another “feature” is they make the pattern a secret. Like somehow knowing when my IP will change makes the network insecure.

Bah! At least I’m still downloading at 1.3MB a sec (yea that’s bytes not bits).

UPDATE: Here is the FiOS for Business pricing matrix. Not even all business accounts have static IPs. What in the world? They ding business users $40/monthly for the pleasure of having a static IP which makes the business side of my package twice the price.

Lesson learned: under no circumstance (no matter how much dirt slips into a drain during a bathroom remodel) do not let the p trap lose its seal. Dry heaves and really bad times ensue.