Dan G. – Page 9 – Dull Razor

Personal battles

For the last several months, I’ve been fighting a battle against myself. It’s a tough fight, and I’m making slow progress, but it’s measurable in the raw numbers. Here’s the problem: When you have a mile to travel, those few hundred feet you’ve come don’t seem like much. And when you move only a few feet at a time, it’s easy to lose track of your progress.

I’ve lost a lot of weight at this point, about 80 pounds; but I still have a long way to go. That sounds like a huge number, and in many respects it is, but I can’t take it for granted. At least some people are starting to notice. It’s encouraging. But tonight for some reason it just seems like nothing – I’m still huge, I’m still grossly out of shape, and I still have so far to go. I can’t help but wonder if this is going anywhere, if it’s possible for me to be anything close to “normal” sized. I’ve never experienced that, so I have no idea what it’s like. I don’t know what I’m missing or have to look forward to – it’s all an abstract. And it seems so far away.

Still. 80 pounds.

Here’s hoping I can dwarf that number. And that there are fewer nights like tonight going forward.

An Outside Perspective

I was chatting tonight on Omegle, a chat site that connects you to strangers from all over the world. I ended up chatting for quite a while with a gal from the Philippines who was very curious about American life. She asked what my heritage was, and I said that my family was mostly of German and British heritage. She was excited and asked what life was like as a mixed-race person in America. I tried to explain that there’s really not a separate cultural identity for most of us of Western European descent – certainly not like there is for, say, my Philippino-American friend.

She thought seemed awfully discriminatory against the various Western European races, lumping them together like that.

I don’t really have much else to say on the topic, just thought it was an interesting perspective.

“For the children” of the day

Sometimes I stumble across things that make me upset, and I want to post about them, but then I find I find out that the news is months old. This is one of those times, but I’m going to post about it anyway because there was a recent update to the story. Take that, standards of relevance!

Today I found out that a singer named Evan Emory was facing jail time and the sex offender registry for a video he made and posted to Youtube. He was being charged with manufacturing child sexual abusive material, or in other words, making child porn. Today he made a plea deal for 60 days of jail time and two years probation.

But here’s the catch: his video was simply a video of him singing an explicit song on his guitar, spliced in with images of kids reacting to someone singing to them in a classroom. The children never heard the song – and this was explicitly mentioned in the video’s disclaimer.

So let’s think about this. What makes this so heinous? I obviously understand that it’s tasteless and crude, but is it criminal? Is it child pornography? Not remotely close.

There is certainly no drought of sexually explicit songs in the mainstream music industry. Any doubters may want to look up songs by Ludacris or Juvenile, among others. Or search for “Khia” for a Youtube hit even more explicit than Evan’s video – it has 4.5 million views.

So maybe it was the fact that it was set in a children’s classroom, or to the tune of a children’s song? Well we should lock up Gilda Radner, Steven Lynch, Katy Perry (and the SNL staff) and who knows how many thousands of Youtube comedians.

Okay so maybe it’s the illusion of having children react to inappropriate adult situations? Well then we’d best get Jimmy Kimmel and Dave Chappelle in cuffs. Chappelle might have to serve life, since in his video, kids were actually present.

The only issue I see here is in his using footage of the children’s faces without permission – which is something the parents could certainly sue for, but isn’t a crime. This is just another example of the government exploiting its power, in the name of the children, to ignore the First Amendment and exercise a little of its muscle in the hopes of getting some votes. It’s disgusting and it’s wrong – far more repulsive than Mr. Emory’s video. And that’s saying something.

Oh no, not this again

So I came across this little gem this morning via Reddit. It seems that a group of scientists have found a way to interfere with THC’s interaction with various molecular receptors, meaning that they can now create THC-based pills with effective, long-term pain relief properties that avoid the high associated with marijuana use. My thought: “Pain pills without the high? Wonderful!”

I wonder how many of the “medical” marijuana advocates will agree.

Given that they’re starting trials, it seems like this is something that could actually become viable on the market. If this happens, I think it will make the lines clearer as to who is in this fight for actual pain relief and valid medical applications versus those who are in it for a way to get high legally.

Should be interesting…

I don’t wanna come back down from this cloud

Yes, I just used a Bush lyric as a title for a blog post on cloud storage. Stop shaking your head like that, you know it’s cool.

So Amazon.com just unveiled their cloud player, which is free to anyone with an Amazon account, along with 5GB of cloud drive space. They currently have a deal where if you buy an MP3 album, they’ll bump you up to 20GB for free for a year – after that it’s $20 a year if you want to keep it. Not a bad deal. And given that they have some pretty good deals on some albums I’ve been listening to lately, I’d recommend you give it a shot. The cloud player itself is easy to use, fairly well organized, and will even do things like add album art based on the nearest match it can find (which can be unintentionally hilarious if you upload stuff from smaller or local artists that Amazon doesn’t know about. Thanks, Flexstyle!) They seem to have borrowed a lot from the traditional music player layout you’d find in a program like iTunes, foobar2k, or Grooveshark, so the UI is pretty intuitive.

Now while it is good, it’s far from perfect, and there are a couple of potentially very irritating issues. For one, it doesn’t include any way to edit the ID3 tags for the MP3s you upload, so you should have that all in order before you upload or else you won’t have the easiest time finding your music – there’s no “folder view” or anything like that in the player. Additionally, the “now playing” interface is basically just that – it shows you only the current song, not the current list of songs it will play, and there doesn’t appear any way to go back to the “Now Playing” list once you’ve navigated away. This means that if you have an album playing, and you go browse your library and want to have it play another album when this one finishes… well, you can’t, at least not without creating a new playlist and adding both albums, then having it play that playlist. This seems to me to be the biggest failure with the UI; hopefully they’ll catch on and update this soon.

As for the cloud drive itself – well, it is what it says it is. It’s a place to upload files, and 5GB is a good amount of storage to start with. It’s pretty generous for a free service; compare that to Dropbox’s 2GB or Google Docs’ 1GB. I think I’d probably use this over Google Docs for storing files I don’t actually want to edit with docs; the interface is just as usable and the space is greater, so there’s no real downside. However, my current addiction for cloud storage is Dropbox, and Amazon won’t be replacing that just yet, for a few key reasons:

Dropbox has an awesome client. This is where Dropbox really shines. You can install a client to your PC, Mac, or Linux machine and have it automatically sync all the contents from a given folder to your cloud storage. It’s incredibly simple and entirely hands-off – once setup, you don’t even notice it’s there. Amazon still sticks to the “upload via the browser” method for most files, though it does have a marginally better downloadable client for uploading music. Still, nothing remotely close to the ease and long-term convenience of Dropbox.
Dropbox lets me share files easily. With Dropbox, I can drop some files in my public folder on the local computer, then create a public link for anyone to access that file. It’s a thousand times easier than the old method of uploading a file via FTP to my webhost and then sharing that link; Dropbox even puts a way to copy the link in the file’s context menu in your operating system. I use this particular feature almost daily and consider it one of the best lesser-known features of Dropbox.
Dropbox can create linked folders. Let’s say you’re another Dropbox user and you want to be able to easily collaborate with me on some project we’re working on. I can share a folder with your account, and anything I put in that folder will also show up in your Dropbox folder as well. You can then update the file, save it back to the folder, and I’ve got the updated copy. Just like that. It’s an elegantly simple solution and it works wonderfully. I used this quite a bit when working on the radio show with my friend Tim. It’s also good for creating a “drop off point” for things that aren’t easy to email – for instance, I had a friend who would drop videos and replays from his Starcraft games into the folder so I could watch them later.

Dropbox remains the best implementation of cloud storage that I’ve found, while keeping a sane and simple interface. Don’t have one? Go get one. It’s free and easy to use, and the higher storage plans are reasonably priced, though Amazon manages to cut their price basically in half, and offers up to a terabyte where Dropbox only will go up to 100GB. However, should you need a ton of storage, Google Docs actually has the cheapest solution by a large margin – you can get a terabyte of storage for $256/year, and up to 16 terabytes of space. That’s about a quarter of what Amazon charges, or an eighth of what Dropbox does, with a much higher potential capacity.

Obviously few people will need this much space, and the free space I’ve gotten from the services has covered everything I need so far – but I may end up subscribing to the $20/year Cloud Player service when my trial is up. Fortunately, I’ve got a year to decide whether it will be worth it.