Dead

This blog is probably gonna go dead for a while unfortunately because I don’t have the time to maintain it.

10 Years Since 9/11

Today marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11, when hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Much has happened since then: we’ve invaded two countries with no happy-ending in sight, the economy entered a recession and has yet to truly emerge, and the Patriot Act was passed allowing the government to keep tabs on Americans without oversight from the Judiciary branch (goodbye forever, civil liberties). The terrorists may have failed to completely destroy government, but they succeeded in making the U.S appear imperialist by invading two Middle Eastern countries, and managed to persuade us to give up civil liberties we’ve cherished for centuries (and we look a lot China and the countries the Arab Spring has touched). Yet Al-Qaeda is considered to be on the run, yet the damage persists (we’re still in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Patriot Act doesn’t appear to be leaving anytime soon). So as we remember those who perished, we must not lose sight of the future and the structure which our nation is based on.

Steve Jobs Resigns As CEO of Apple

Today, Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple stepped down as CEO from Apple. He will be replaced by Tim Cook, former COO of Apple who had been running the day-to-day operations of Apple while Jobs was on medical leave. His resignation came as a complete surprise as his “indefinite” medical leave faded from the newsphere. Jobs is widely credited with bringing Apple back from near-disaster and making it one of the word’s most valuable companies with his instinct for the public’s desire and many products that created new classes of personal devices, such as the iPhone and iPad and bringing attention to others with products such as the iPod.

Magnitude 5.8 Earthquake, Centered in Virginia

So that wasn’t a truck?! It was an earthquake, magnitude 5.8 (moderately sized) centered in Mineral, Virginia. Many public buildings were evacuated, such as the Pentagon and the Capitol.

A bit of a privacy problem

I noticed that on a CNET news page, there’s a +1 button (which is Google’s equivalent of Facebook’s Like button). What’s disturbing is that I never told the +1 button/CNET what my Google account was (although I assume it’s because I had my iGoogle page open in the same browser but I’m not an expert there) and yet when I hovered over the button it showed me that it knew my email and name.

Youtube: Celebrities, New interface

Most people who have visited Youtube have heard of celebrities such as NigaHiga/HigaTV, kevjumba/JumbaFund, and smosh. But looking at their earliest videos, I’m led to wonder how they became so popular, with the exception of NigaHiga where How to be Ninja is funny and entertaining. But kevjumba’s and smosh’s first video(s) seem ehhh… bad. It’s probably because initially it looks like they both just put up random videos but then started putting up funnier/more relevant videos.  Ok… now that my little rant is over, here’s something I noticed when I visited Youtube, an interface change in the media player itself. Instead of the old black on white (minus the red speech bubble thing for annotations) it’s black on white (NO WAY, really?!). Well, more like grey on black. I think it’s a nice refresh.

UPDATE right after I posted this (lol): In finding the links for this post, I discovered the interface change apparently doesn’t affect their channels.

What do you think?

Egypt: So Much For Freedom

Well Hosni Mubarak has been gone for a while now and the military’s still here (although they said elections would be in September). As of yet they’re imprisoning protestors and then trying them in military courts. Sound familiar? It’s Mubarak all over again, but to be sure, we’ll have to wait until September. One can hope…

IPv6 Test Drive Today!

Of course, the first question may be, WTF is IPv6? It’s the 6th version of the internet protocol, which doesn’t mean much to really anybody. The main difference between it and IPv4 (what you were using yesterday and what you’ll use tomorrow until IPv6 is fully deployed) it that instead of x.x.x.x (where x is a number from 0-255, inclusive) it’s x.x.x.x.x.x (6 Xs, where the same rules apply as to IPv4). IPv6 is better in that instead of having 256^4 IP addresses (x has 256 values, and 4 places for them…) we now have 256^6 possible addresses. Now that that’s taken care of, the real story is that a bunch of companies (Google, Facebook, …) are going to use IPv6 for today. Supposedly “wide swaths of the internet might not be inaccessible”. Well that hasn’t happened to me (hello, I’m blogging!). I hate having to use that ^ sign(vs. superscript)!

Patriot Act Extended

On Thursday, the Patriot Act was extended, continuing to allow the FBI to get whatever information it wants (after asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that it’s for an investigation of course). Some senators say that the government has a secret interpretation allowing the government to have even more access to “[information] for an authorized investigation… to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” Because of this, they had pushed for reform to prevent possible violation of the 4th Amendment protecting us from “unreasonable searches or seizures”. But those attempts failed one way or another. If the senators are right, then one could say we’re deviating from our path as a free and open nation, and we’re on our way to a country where we elect leaders but we have no idea what the heck they’re doing. Hopefully not, but we probably won’t know since the administration declined to declassify even basic use of the Patriot Act. Maybe we’ll become the Land of the Free Oppressed and the Land of the Brave Scared to Death. Great possibility, no?

Where’s the Rapture?

As you can plainly see, it didn’t happen. So much for 200 million people being saved. Most likely, 89 year-old Harold Camping was wrong. That, or we’re all going to hell. And where are the earthquakes? Weren’t we supposed to be living in hell right now? Maybe we are. But how would that explain the happy people on the planet?