Remember to check out these musicians.
Stanley Jordan
Louis Johnson who doesn't have a web page.
I saw these guys on a Jazz TV Channel yesterday. Louis Johnson plays an unbelievable slap bass funky style, and Stanley Jordan uses both hands to play notes on a guitar, and sometimes two guitars at a time (one hand on each ;-) ). It really just blew me away.
In a digital handbasket.
Have you ever gone to Blogspot and just clicked "next blog" for an hour? Well, this brings upon some enlightening thoughts about where the internet is going. Every other site is spam. Every third site is some young kid who uses sentences like "ive bin bz lol and work sux lol and my cat dide lol". Once every 10 clicks or so you'll find a nice, intelligible person who writes in proper English (or almost, like me), complete sentences, and has something meaningful to say. The rest of the sites are in some other language, so I have no say on them.
There are numerous sites out there that let people have a website and write thoughts on it. That's all good and dandy. But it's like a guy at the beach wearing a speedo, when you know that guy shouldn't be wearing a speedo, and no one will tell him that he shouldn't be wearing one. So, it's not against the law, but it's not pleasant for anyone... His daughter won't even be on the same beach as him, the wife is hiding under an umbrella, pretending to be asleep and/or reading a book, you know the scene.
I have nothing against free speech, free press, free anything. There are consistently low quality performances in all walks of life. Some movies suck, video games, books, tv shows, the Phillies, etc. Some are expressions of emotion, like a "blog" would be. There are also those on the extreme opposite end of that spectrum. Like, for one thing, the Eagles rule. Also, Plato's books rule, and I'm sure there's a good video game out there somewhere.
Obviously, I don't have to view those websites, and that's the other freedom granted in Free Press, Free Speech, and everything else free. The freedom to ignore. God Bless America.
OK, so while the Internet isn't going to hell from all the n00bs out there posting incoherent ramblings using long-ass sentences consisting of words of no more than 4 characters in length, it's still going to hell.
So, I'm going to look for a domain name to purchase to park this site at, and I try like a hundred different things that might closely resemble something that I would be proud to have as a domain name. I search the WHOIS database like nobody's business, finding all these domain names taken. I have to investigate, right? I visit the first domain name, and it's a "GoDaddy" site. The next one is a "Register.com" site. This happened for about 10 different domain names and at least 4 different registrar sites (like Network Solutions also). So many people, or "abstracts" even, own so many domain names. Luckily I was able to get the ones I wanted because of a cleverly inserted hyphen :) I say abstracts because these people buy domain names, and then try to get a sucker to buy it from them for at least 10 times what they paid. This just sucks for the future of the internet. It only costs $35 (max) a year to keep a domain name and not use it. Domain names are allowed to be pretty long (you can pretty much find the history of the internet on this site), so there are infinite, or close to it, permutations of domain names. I'd hate to know someone at an newly established domain name 20 years from now. Hey what's your website? Oh, it's www.mydomainnameissolongbecausethestupidpeople
inyourdayboughtupallthedomainnamesandididnothaveabazilliondollarstobuytheoneiwanted.com
Great. So, how do I email you? It's bob@my... no, I'm not going to type it again. That wasted 5 minutes already.
Other reasons the internet is going to hell...
Spam is too obvious. Worms are too obvious... Virii is a cool word, but it's still too obvious. Fraud... too obvious. Porn even... what else is bad with the internet?
I'm not a lawyer, but open source is good. Knowledge sharing is good. Being able to easily find something that you're looking for is great. With the internet growing at a rate that it is (google is now indexing 8 BILLION+ websites, just a few years ago it was at 2-3 billion), there won't be any tools capable of searching the internet and bringing back relevant results. I searched for my name, and figuring I'm searching for my name, it should return my website. I got to the 7th page before I gave up. One of these days there will need to be artificial intelligence of the human kind to be able to search the internet. Not that AI is bad (unless you think the Matrix is real :) ), but it's HARD! I'm no genius, but I worked with AI in college. VERY interesting subject. Mind boggling, even. Exciting. Fascinating. It's awesome. But anyways, back to the internet...
One thing that comes to my mind when I hear the words "The internet is going to hell", is the obvious notion of compatibility. Sharing information between sites can now be done in a thousand ways, as long as those sites share their methods of sharing information. Let me list them... SOAP through Web Services, plain XML, RSS, ATOM, XMLRPC, RPC, Remoting, and anything else that someone may want to program. Granted, the WWW Consortium is trying to get a grasp on all of these methods, almost none of them are standardized through them. The happy internet is the standardized internet. Imagine, if google, instead of just reading all of the HTML through a website url, can just ask a website "Yo, what's your deal?!" and the website can respond back "Dude, I am a guitar shop, here are my wares." And google says "Awesome, Jason Connell was searching for guitars the other day, he wanted a new stratocaster, I'll email this to him right away. He found one for $500 but judging by your prices, he's gonna crap his pants. In fact, let's just place the order now, shall we? I have his credit card and mailing address..." Without standardization in server methods and in browsers, we won't even come close to that point :)
So, that was my very compelling argument on why the internet is going to hell. I hope you enjoyed it. Please comment below.
A while ago I bought a QuickTime Pro license. I wanted to make the movies smaller so I could not have to worry about going on for 3 minutes and having people download a movie all day long. I had formatted and reinstalled Windows after I bought it, and I couldn't find the registration key for a while, but I found it. So there are 2 new movies up there for your viewing and listening pleasure, and they are all a lot smaller than they would be without the magic of Apple software. View the movies here.
[Update] I've simplified (but not beautified) the process of downloading. You will be prompted with a link after you click download, so that way you can right click and save it instead of opening the file in the browser. Also, I've added a file size to each download so you get an idea of how much free time I have... oh and how long it'll take you to download.
Netscape 8 is out now. I'm set in my ways with the Mozilla Suite, but I'll give my initial reactions on Netscape 8 anyway. From what I've read, it can use Mozilla's rendering engine (which is Netscape's, it's called Gecko) or IE's rendering engine which, from what I know, doesn't have a cool name (Do any of Microsoft's products?? Longhorn, Whistler, Yukon, ... No, none of them have cool code names, and all of their product names suck). So judging from this style of compatibility solution, I wouldn't use it. From what I can tell, Microsoft doesn't have the security background as some people may think, they also piss people off.
I don't think a hybrid solution will work. Ahh, here's a nice piece of crap information. Take the tour of Netscape 8, go into "Security", click the right arrow 2 or 3 times... you'll find that the browser will render safe sites using "the Internet Explorer method" for "maximum compatibility"... Oh man, Netscape's hit the bottom, they're now kissing Microsoft's butt. First off, Mozilla is the "standards compliant" browser, however, most web developers write their Javascript and HTML to pretty much only work in IE. ECMAScript (JavaScript's other name) was invented at Netscape and later taken and seriously altered by Microsoft, so now there are two versions. You can learn about Javascript here.
In conclusion, Netscape 8 uses IE so it inherits all of its flaws with respects to standards compliancy. Eventually, IE will need to conform to these standards, but it will still have the security flaws. Mozilla or FireFox are based on these standards, which make web developing not as complex as it used to be, back when the browser market share was a tight battle between Netscape and Microsoft, coinciding Windows 98 which came with IE4 and Microsoft's version of ECMAScript. Mozilla based code doesn't even know what an "ActiveX" object is, so it gains a TON of security advantages there. It's the safe way to browse the web on a Windows machine.
Having no Phillies to watch last night, Jeff (my brother) and I scraped our funds together for a movie night. Having just $8.37 between us, we got two movies. Blade Trinity and The Aviator.
Stay tuned for reviews! I woke up at 5:30am yesterday, I fell asleep an hour into Blade Trinity (which was cool from what I saw) and was asleep for the whole night, so I don't know if Jeff put on The Aviator or not. I wanted to see that one. But now the Phillies are on again tonight, plus it's Friday. So we might be watching the game at Casey's or some other local drinking establishment :)
If the sum of the odors of a pile of clothes (or clothes in a closet) passes the sniff test, than any item of clothing in the whole is acceptable for wearing.
This is only a theory.
In Philly, you will not be able to smoke in bars or restaurants. Bars have 2 years to comply, and there will be exemptions for private clubs and stuff like that, but everyone else has to comply by the beginning of next year.
Thankfully, I live and party in the suburbs :) Well, I wonder if Conshohocken will be doing anything similar, although, it really doesn't matter that much, the Great American Pub already is 1/4 non-smoking. Everybody is in the non smoking room, so to be hip, you can't smoke (a little different from High School and typical peer pressure). I'm glad they are outlawing it. Whenever I get a slight urge to smoke in a bar, I just do it. There's no thinking, by the time I think I might want a cigarette, it's in my mouth and lit. So, having everything non-smoking will help me a bit. But again, the ban is only in the city for now, and not even now since bars, again, have 2 years to comply.
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