Today I consider whether or not TV Stations as a distinct programming lineup have become obsolete.  More or less since the beginning of commercial television there have been TV Stations to tune in to.  (eg ABC, HBO, TNT)  These stations create and broadcast original programming or buy the rights to broadcast programming created by others so that I can pick it up on my television.  Every year they decide which television shows will play throughout the day for the next year.  This show should play on Thursday at 2000 because that’s when such and such an age group will be watching.  That show should be on at Monday at 2100 because otherwise it might have to compete with a show from another network.  Some shows have nearly literally lived and died based on the timeslot they were shown in.  Sometimes shows are moved around to follow other shows to benefit from the inertia of the viewers of the previous show to carry this one until it either proves itself or fails.

A lot of websites have funny page-not-found (404) and maintenance pages. I got a good chuckle out of Plurk’s maintenance page.

[caption id=“attachment_1387” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Plurk Maintenance Page”] [/caption]

I finished up The Two Towers a week or so ago and I have to say that “Trudging” no longer describes my experience (for the most part). While I preferred the first movie to the first book, I mostly feel exactly the opposite about the second book/movie. The only annoying thing was that we didn’t get to Frodo and Samwise until page 208 of a 352 page book. I can’t remember exactly, but I think the movie goes back and forth a lot more instead of doing like the book and telling each person’s day and then backing up to tell the next person’s day (if the party has been separated).

There’s been a lot of news for the past 3-6 months about the new FISA bill and how it provides immunity for the telecommunications companies.  A lot of people including the Electronic Frontier Foundation are opposed to this provision of the bill (if not bill in its entirety) because they say the telcos have acted illegally by assisting the Executive Branch with their warrentless wiretapping of phone calls.  The reason they argue this is illegal is that the original FISA bill, as written in the 1970s (and ammended throughout the years) requires a warrant for all wiretapping of US Persons.  That includes foreigners who are physically in the United States.   As the New York Times revealed in 2005, the Bush Administration started acting against this law in 2001 because of opinions written by some radicals in the Justice Department (such as Yoo).

This year has been an incredibly racist year from people being afraid to vote for Barack Obama because they believe he’s a secret Muslim (so? Any American-born person should be allowed to run for president) to people who say he’s too black or not black enough. Now this old guy claims that Obama’s an Oreo and it’s unfair for him to reap the rewards of the Civil Rights battles of the previous generations.

Welcome to my new series where I wonder if some concepts and technologies are now obsolete thanks to our new paradigms and technologies.  Today’s topic - evangelism.

Short term readers of my blog will think I only write about Linux and technology.  Long term readers will know that I’m a Christian.  I was brought up  (what the media refers to as) an evangelical.  Specifically, I was brought up as a Baptist.  My entire church life though high school involved being told how we had to spread the Word of God.  Indeed, if you believe in the divinity of Jesus and the infallibility of The Bible, it even says in the Gospels that Jesus commanded his followers to spread the “Good News”.  And so they became the first missionaries.

I’ve known about micro-blogging for 1-2 years now - ever since I first started hearing about Twitter. Up until now I’ve been vehemently against the whole micro-blogging trend. To begin with, it requires anyone who wants to keep up with my writing to check yet another website! On top of that, I just can’t see a point to it. I even told my brother last weekend, why can’t I just have nice, short posts on my blog? But recently I’ve been hearing more and more about these micro-blogging services. It keeps being mentioned over and over on the net, in podcasts, pretty soon I’m sure CNN will be doing a piece on it. I know I’m late to the party when, according to Wikipedia, Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton have Twitter accounts. But, still, I hear all these complaints micro-blogging overload and people talking about ridiculously inane things such as what they just ate for lunch.

This will be a few days old by the time this blog post appears on the site, but Gnome 3.0 is set to come out by 2010!  This is huge news!  Ever since Gnome started getting into the 2.2x series, people have constantly been asking about when Gnome 3.0 would be coming out.  Since the Gnome project has decided that Gnoem 3.0 would be an appropriate time to break API and ABI compatibility, they have been saving that until it was needed.  However, ever since KDE 4 was announced a few years ago, people have increased their calls for a Gnome 3.0.  After all, they don’t want to seem so ridiculously behind when compared to KDE.  Computer geeks like you and I know that doesn’t matter, but the lay person might think Gnome was outdated.  Now that KDE 4.0 is finally out and with KDE 4.1 due at the end of this month, it seems that the momentum has finally built up for Gnome 3.0.