I'm creating a flyer for an ultimate league, and went to my trusty graphics companion software, the GIMP. When I chose "Create New Image" and looked at the list of template documents, I realized one of the options is Toilet Paper (US, 300dpi) which struck me as extremely funny.

First, what kind of person would design a document to be printed on toilet paper (and how the heck do you feed that into your printer, anyway)?

And second, this is apparently the US format of toilet paper-- does that mean other countries have other standard sizes? I had no idea.

Yesterday President Bush was in Chicago speaking about (surprise!) immigration and (even more surprise!) the "war on terror", and he said this:Wow, you can just smell the irony dripping from his lips, can't you? He speaks of property rights (hello, eminent domain!) and human rights (hello, rendition and waterboarding!), goes on to recall justice (hello, PATRIOT Act, goodbye habeus corpus!) and "transparency" (hello, state secrets!), and finally ends with concern about the erosion of democracy (hello, PATRIOT Act again!).

Do people really believe anything he says any more? In my mind, the United States has lost so much face with the international community that for us to stand up and preach to other countries about democracy and justice and human rights is not only ironic, but insulting.

From today's Washington Post (emphasis mine):It just gets worse and worse. Why is the Bush administration so afraid of the truth?

"Okay, maybe I'll take a break from writing about politics and write about something more fun next time. Like puppies."

-- Moby

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

-- Ayn Rand

Below is an awesome (real) sign from someone's Flickr photoset. There was a contest on Fark to caption it, and some of the results were riotous.

Don't transport pebbles in your mouth; you could sink the boat.

When that rolling tire slams you into the rail, you'll surely blow chunks.

No running on the deck! We have determined the precise "ball racking" height of the guardrails.

Danger! Do not run into groin-level railing when escaping.

Be careful not to bump your head on minor constellations.

Here's an awesome shot of the International Space Station:

According to today's Denver Post, the city of Boulder is considering a taxpayer-funded "hate hotline". This hotline will allow residents of Boulder to call and report racist language. Apparently they think that will put a damper on "hate speech" or something.

Yeah, so if I'm standing on the Pearl Street Mall and some guy is shouting epithets about blacks, Jews, Hindis, Republicans, short people, panhandlers, or whatever, I guess I'm supposed to whip out my cell phone and call the hotline. I'm sure it'll stop him cold when he realizes what I'm doing. And I'm sure the police will drop everything to rush to the Mall and cuff this guy.

As David Harsanyi, the Denver Post columnist says,Even more to the point, he goes on to sayI guess we'll see how the city council vote goes tomorrow. For now, I just shake my head and wonder who comes up with this stuff.

It looks like AT&T will be changing their corporate logo...

In a rousing discussion on Slashdot about whether the government should be permitted to compile a DNA database of all citizens for criminal investigations, one comment caught my eye.

Today's spam message (only one!) was the usual source of "enhancement" drugs, but I thought it was interesting that the dummy text used to fool the spam filters was a little snippit from The Hobbit. To stoop so low...

So just for kicks, I created a login on the RNC web site under the pretense of hosting a crazy GOP House Party. Here's the e-mail message I received after I completed the registration:Awesome. I'm "empowered to share the Party's message".

For some reason, though, seeing Party capitalized like that makes me think of the Communist Party, and suddenly I feel like I'm the propaganda minister for Red China or something. Now I have to go wash my hands.

Hey kids, if you're bored this weekend, why not host a GOP House Party?

According to this page on the Republican National Committee's official web site, you can quickly and easily organize a party for all of the people "who support the President and the Republican ticket". Of course, with the latest polls showing Bush's approval rating at 29%, and Congress sitting at a juicy 18%, it will probably be a fairly small party.

But that's not all! If you tell the RNC about your party, you're entered into a drawing for a Special Edition iPod. I kid you not. Here's the shot from the web site:

From a discussion on Slashdot today:

Here we go.

Apple has a new set of ads comparing Windows computers to Macs. They're quite funny, but I think the best comparison is simply in the image they use on the page. It makes a great distinction between the kinds of people who use Windows and the kinds of people who use Macs.

(I shudder to think what the Linux guy would look like, but maybe Red Hat or someone will make some ads too.)

Like many people in the Denver area, I gripe about Qwest and their terrible customer service, installation hassles, and unasked-for packages on my bill. But today I can cheer for them, as it's been revealed they were the only one of the four major telecommunications carriers who stood up to the NSA in late 2001 by refusing to hand over a database containing call records for everyone on their network.

Last December we all learned that Bush had been authorizing warrantless (ahem, illegal) wiretaps on American citizens. I'm still waiting for that story to play out in court-- although most likely it won't. At the time, he made it abundantly clear that the NSA was only investigating international calls, because everyone knows that's where the terrorists are. I guess we were all supposed to feel better that people calling Pakistan and Afghanistan got a little extra love from the NSA, but the rest of us were free from Big Brother.

Not so. Now we learn that the NSA has been collecting call records (number called, time, and duration) for 200 million Americans since fall 2001. It's the largest single database in the world, and they're doing it all because they want us to be safer from terrorists. Keep in mind that domestic surveillance of this nature is almost certainly illegal, although cynics like me know the Bush administration will find some way to spin it as a legal move because the President can do whatever he wants in a "time of war".

In any case, it turns out that when the NSA came a-knocking, three of the major phone providers-- AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth-- opened right up and handed over their confidential customer information. They've continued doing so for the past four and a half years, providing the NSA with periodic updates so the database is complete.

Well, not quite complete. Qwest told the NSA to blow it out their ears, and not to come back without a court order. The NSA made some thinly-veiled threats, waved the banner of patriotism, and invoked the tired "national security" argument... all to no avail. Qwest refused to hand over their data, and after almost three years of negotiations, finally broke off all talks with the NSA. Now, a few years after that, they remain the lone holdout.

Good for them. At least the list of the thousands of phone calls I've made for the past four years isn't sitting in an NSA computer somewhere.

Apparently there's a new rage in footwear these days: Nude Sandals.

Basically, they're nothing more than thin rubber soles that stick to the bottoms of your feet using a "special water-based adhesive". They peel off at the end of the day (without leaving a sticky residue, thankfully) and you can stick them back on tomorrow.

I've never been the best-dressed guy around, and it's well known that I spend the vast majority of my days barefoot. So it's a bit baffling why this is so revolutionary. Why not just go barefoot in the first place? Since the sandals are essentially invisible, there's no practical way to tell if someone is wearing them or just prancing around sans footwear.

I suppose I should be grateful, actually: if these really catch on and people start going to stores and restaurants in them, there's no reason why I couldn't just walk around barefoot all of the time. These days I keep my sandals in the car, just in case I need to slip them on at a store... in the new world order, I wouldn't even need to own shoes!

Here's a hilarious shot from Flickr: the seldom-seen life of a ninja blogger.

It's not much fun to be a kid these days, particularly in Portland, Oregon. The Portland public school district has officially adopted a policy that says playgrounds cannot have any of the following:

swing sets

merry-go-rounds

tube slides

jungle gyms

teeter-totters

And, of course, playing tag is against the rules, as is running. That's right, elementary school kids aren't allowed to run on the playground. Without any of the fun equipment above, and without being allowed to run, I'm not sure what's left-- a thrilling game of marbles or something?

Sorry, kids. Old people and overprotective parents suck.

Zack has a couple of his friends over today, and they're in the basement playing a variant of Duck Duck Goose where they run around the circle saying

Darth Vader...
Darth Vader...
Darth Vader...
JEDI!

Hilarious.

As part of our science "enrichment" course at school, Laralee and I taught a lesson about forces and thrust. It was just a weak cover story for our real goal, which was to blow up some Diet Coke. In an impressive display, I dropped five Mentos ("The Freshmaker!") into a two-liter bottle, and we got a fountain that was probably twelve feet high.

Science is so fun.

"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH, the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."

-- Terry Pratchett

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something."

-- Robert Heinlein

I'm listening to Duel of the Fates from The Phantom Menace (great piece of music!) and it occurred to me that I've never understood what they're saying in the song. It also occurred to me that AmaroK, my music player, has the ability to download lyrics from the internet and display them.

So I gave it a go, and... well... I guess now I know what they're saying.

You've got to like Captain Obvious.

As the RIAA and MPAA continue their sad and misguided quests to control the distribution and use of all audio and video media, I've been thinking about the boundaries of copyright law and how, precisely, they fit into the business model these groups are attempting to force on consumers.

I came up with a little gedankenexperiment to illustrate my thought process, and I'm curious where the lines are drawn. Here goes.

Laralee and I have heard good things about the TV series Alias, so we decided to watch a few episodes. I went to Blockbuster and rented the first episodes of season one. This is a set of two DVDs with a total of eight 45-minute episodes. It's important to note that Blockbuster requests that the DVDs be returned in one week.

Okay, so I take home the DVDs and we pop them into the DVD player to watch the pilot episode. I don't think anyone would argue that we're breaking any copyright laws.

But now, as part of our thought experiment, let's pretend my DVD player broke after we watched the pilot. We've still got seven episodes to watch, and a few days before we have to return them to Blockbuster. What to do? No problem-- I've got a computer with a DVD drive. We head over to the computer and insert the DVD, then sit back to watch episode 2. Still no copyright infringement, right?

Dang, the DVD drive is pretty sluggish and the computer is having trouble playing the show at full speed. We're getting lots of choppy scenes and pauses, and it's really annoying. The show isn't watchable, so I tell Laralee it's no problem-- I'll just copy it to the computer's hard drive, which is much faster than the DVD drive.

It takes a while, but eventually we have the files on the hard drive. We crank up the DVD software and tell it to load the hard drive "disc image" instead of a physical disc. It's much faster than before, and we enjoy episode 3.

But we're pretty busy in the evenings, and we don't get a chance to watch for a few nights. Blockbuster wants the DVDs back or they'll charge us. What to do? Well, how about if I copy the second DVD to my hard drive as well? Then I can return them to Blockbuster, and we'll just watch the next episodes at our leisure. So I do that, return the DVDs, and we watch episode 4 that night.

Keep in mind that recording something to watch later is called "time shifting" in the industry, and that's all I've done here-- I've taken a legal copy of a DVD I rented and time-shifted the content a couple of days, so we can watch it when we find the time to do so. The federal courts have upheld the right to time-shift video content as "fair use" under copyright law, so it seems I still haven't broken any laws.

Fortunately, I manage to fix my DVD player. Obviously I'd rather watch the bigscreen from the couch than the teensy computer monitor in an office chair. But how? Wait-- I've got a couple of DVD-R discs in my office (I use them for periodic data backups). I grab them and burn the hard drive image to a DVD. Now Laralee and I can watch episode 5 on the bigscreen.

Are we there yet? Have we broken the law?

Now my friend wants to come over and watch the show with us. He's heard it's a good series, so we invite him to the house and we all watch episode 6. Does this count as a "public performance", which is the term we see in all those FBI warnings at the start of all DVDs? We're still in the privacy of our home, and we didn't charge admission or anything, so we're probably okay.

My friend really likes the show, and wants to see episode 7, but sadly he can't come over tomorrow, so I lend him the DVD. He takes it home and watches it on his own television, then returns it to us a few days later. Is this legal?

Finally, my friend says he wants to see episode 8 as well, but he's moving out of the state. Because I'd hate for him to miss the pivotal episode, I burn a second DVD-R and mail it to him so he can watch it in his new house.

You can see how there's a natural progression here; my question is where it crosses the line into criminal activity. The MPAA would have us believe that "pirating" movies hurts the artists-- and far be it from me to hurt Jennifer Garner, the star of Alias-- but what actions here were hurtful to her or to the industry in general?

It's hard to know what's legal and what's not with the changing landscape of digital technology, and my gedankenexperiment really isn't that far removed from reality. What does the MPAA want? Is it realistic for them to expect me to buy a new DVD player and television (with appropriate digital rights management software on both) so I can watch season 2 of Alias? Current proposed legislation would have us do exactly that. Is it unreasonable for me to watch it on a computer, or time-shift it to a more convenient day?

These are tough questions, but I think the approach of the MPAA and RIAA is completely out of touch with reality, and will only serve to alienate the very people who are purchasing their products. It's a short-sighted solution to a dead business model, and sooner or later it will catch them.

Although I'm a loyal follower of Talk Like a Pirate Day every year, I'm not so sure I'm going to celebrate No Pants Day this Friday...

"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."

-- George Orwell