Holy crap, Jon Stewart got even (how is this possible?) more awesome.

woohoo. Wish the keyboard was of the backlit variety. 
I need to reinforce the screen mounts, too. But yum.

almost there. We have functionality. Now to add the backlit keyboard, 
mount the screen above the motherboard at an angle, and finish the case. mmm.

For keyboard, I'm trying to get one of these.
But the rep from the distributor I talked to hasn't called me back, sigh.
Hopefully they will soon.

Something has been pissing me off about these debates. It's that sometimes there
are arguments that at least to me, the non-political non-accountant non-lawyer,
are not being made.

For example, Bush says that Kerry's tax increases for the rich will hit around 
900,000 people who own small businesses that are subchapter S corporations 
with higher taxes, therefor making them less inclined to create jobs.

Kerry's argument back is that many of these subchapter S corps are people who
have tiny shares in companies, and the actual number is more like 200-300k.

OK that's valid, but they are missing the BIG FUCKING POINT!

My understanding of subchapter S corporations is that only PROFIT or LOSS can be
passed through to the shareholders' tax returns. So really, in order for you,
as a subchapter S shareholder, to be hit by a tax increase for the rich (I 
believe they like to stay starting at 200k) is if your business PROFITS more
than 200k in a given year. Not grosses, but profits. So the argument that Bush
is making, basically becomes:

   Small businesses that are very successful and making their owners over
   200k a year will be hit with higher taxes, therefor those business owners
   will not be as inclined to hire more people, etc.
 
Which just doesn't make sense, at least to me, the small business owner. If
you're making over 200k a year, paying an additional 10% in taxes, really,
isn't that big of a deal. 

Nevermind the arguments that Bush makes, that "taxing the rich won't work
because they have lawyers and accountants and can get out of paying taxes".

HE ACTUALLY SAID THAT (or something very close to that).

AND NOBODY NOTICES!


don't get me started on missle defense

October 9, 2004
I wrote up a slightly clearer version of my earlier rant, and sent it to 
the Kerry campaign (though I'm sure it'll never get read). Here is it:

---begin quote

This is regarding the debate of whether raising taxes for individuals making 
over $200,000 a year is bad for small businesses. 

The problem with the Kerry campaign's position on the subject is that they 
only dispute the number of small businesses who would be affected. 

The reality of the way subchapter S corporations works is that only PROFITS or 
LOSSES for a corporation can be passed to the shareholders, so only businesses 
who are PROFITING over $200,000 a year would have increased tax.

This is an important distinction,  because it undermines the point of what 
Bush likes to say, that (paraphrasing) "businesses will not be able to create 
or maintain jobs if you increase the taxes on them".  

This is nonsense, because paying employees would happen pre-tax, as an expense.

Please please please use this perspective at the next debate. Please. 
For all of us. Thank you,

Justin

P.S. A one line summary is: "Taxing corporate profits isn't taxing employment."

---end quote.

More cross action. soon it will be working. Very soon. mmm.

Perhaps a better link for the video of APC's cover of Imagine is 
this one (use realplayer or *cough*better*cough* Real Alternative) 

Woot the cross is coming along....

Wow, A Perfect Circle continues to amaze me. The album Thirteenth Step is
so wonderful, the video for "Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drum"
is so insanely good, and now, their cover of "Imagine"... wow. The video for it, especially...

building_cross_2.jpg

Since taking that picture, I sanded the outside which makes it look a lot 
nicer, and glued in some motherboard and soundboard mounts. woot.
time to go buy some blind nuts, well, tomorrow anyway....


right on

October 3, 2004
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20041003041632172

I really could not agree more with that article. Seriously.
The system is fucked. No more software patents! Please!

Time to get shit done.

Got an Archos AV480. So awesome, it's the first portable device that makes
me want to use it rather than my ipod. Only a few requests, for Archos:
  + make it so navigation of lots of files in the browser views is faster, 
    i.e., more acceleration on the cursor. Or make it configurable.
  + MPEG-1 support would be so awesome. I want to be able to drop in my 
    VideoCD-bitrate (or less) MPG and play it natively. Pleaase :)
  + DIV3 (classic DIVX) support would be nice too. Transcoding is lame. 
  + being able to schedule recordings via a simple text file (rather than
    using Yahoo calendar stuff), so you could specify:
      M,T,W,Th 20:00 0:30 249 "The Daily Show"
    for a recurring recording would be sweet.
  + (would be total gravy) Visualizations for audio (you guys want a contractor to
    do it? I may be able to help.. let me know)
  + Oh yes, being able to charge (or at least trickle charge) via USB would
    be nice, too..

Other than that, so awesome. The ability to just record any program and have
it encode it is brilliant, love it. 

Anyway...

The Muse pictures are here.

What I'm kinda proud of is that I took about 270 pictures, and except for
about 15 of them (which for the most part had completely wrong exposures due
to lighting changes, or whatnot), they all turned out pretty damned neat.

I could do more of this, photography, mmm...

Woot, got to go see Muse last night. They really rocked. Got to take 
some pictures too, they will be up soon.
I'm kinda getting over a cold (as usual), but after going to the show last
night and crouching to take pictures a bunch, my legs are sooo weak feeling.
It's really freaky, even. I feel like I just packed a 90lb pack up a few 
thousand vertical feet trail or something. ugh.

Woot had a good weekend, Ian and Zoe came to visit and we saw the
Beastie Boys play... They were good, very good in fact, and on seeing
them come out in band form on a well lit float, I almost shat my pants.

I've liked using Firefox so much that I think I'm going to try using
Thunderbird for mail for a while, instead of mutt. Well really I'll
use a combination of the two, depending on where I am..

So I upgraded my XP laptop to SP2 today, which was alright. I figured
what the heck, and had it install WMP10, too.  Just for fun, I played
with WMP10 a little, and then I started laughing. It was just such a
joke of a product-- it actually makes iTunes look GOOD to me!

Don't get me started on how ridiculous it is that they are at version
10, either. What a joke.

Now I could go off on the 10 easy to reproduce bugs I noticed, or 
how it took it 10 minutes to scan all of my music (that WA5 would 
do in about 45 seconds), or how it got much of the metadata wrong, 
or how its music database was 20mb (vs WA5's 2mb database), etc, 
but I won't, instead:

I played with it a little more, and started messing with its 
visualization effects. These are even more pathetic! One of them was
even a nearly exact copy of the rotating 3d dot spectrum analyzer I
originally wrote back in like 1997, that did manage to end up as an
AVS effect. It just amazes me how shitty of a product this can be.
So I figured, there have to be some better visualizations out there
for it, right? So I went and checked out their site, and the best
thing I could find was G-force (which now they are trying to sell
G-Force Gold for $10), and I laughed even more. G-Force is such a
piece of crap. I mean really! Compare it to AVS or Milkdrop, and 
they just aren't in the same league. 

COME ON PEOPLE. I haven't touched AVS in over a year, it's been
out for over 6 years, and the only thing that I've seen that
comes close is shit that Geiss did (cheers, Ryan). OK so there
are some decent newer 3d accelerated plugins too, but those
really aren't the same if you ask me...

Today I was driving to pick up Al from the airport, and listening to 
the album 'Sneaker Pimps - Becoming X', and I started thinking about
how strange (albeit good) an album it is... now some of my impressions
may be incorrect, but:

It's an album written and produced by two guys, joined for lyrics
by a woman who sounds (and afaik is) fucking hot, and the lyrics are
clearly written by the guys. The lyrics are borderline crude, but
as a guy, I find a woman singing them to be strangely titillating.
To think, these guys temporarily add a woman singer to their band,
back in the time where it was the "in" thing to do, have her sing
ridiculous and offensive lyrics, and it all works really well. 

Who would have thought that it would work? 
It's too bad I don't find their newer albums (well, only heard "Bloodsport") any good...