Archive for December 2005
Indie-Mobile now has a tutorial as well as all the software needed to turn your CDs into ringtones and how to use myMobile to get them onto your phone for free. As long as the data plan for your phone isn’t too expensive, this could save you a lot of money using mp3 ringtones. I don’t really see the point in paying 2-3 dollars for a low quality portion of a song when you already paid $1 from iTunes or $15-$20 for the entire CD.
and a Happy New Year!
According to some there is a war on Christmas. Some companies have stopped mentioning Christmas, sure. But then again, their demographic is not just Christians. So saying “Happy Holidays” is appropriate. Coke doesn’t even display Santa on their cans anymore. They’ve gone with Polar Bears. But wait, what’s that music in the background…could it be…it’s saying “Christmas.” On the radio, Christmas songs are playing. “Christmas With the Kranks” “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” “A Christmas Story” Christmas. Christmas. Christmas.
There’s as much a war on Christmas as there is a war on “under God.” A handful of nutjobs are so offended at the notion of “Christmas” that they’re oppressing a handful of people around them. These stories get picked up and made into something they’re not. Sears is a huge retailer and it’s “Merry Christmas” everywhere. There are Grinches in the world. And maybe they do really hate Christmas and want it to go away. But that’s never going to happen.
And it’s just as wrong to force Christmas on everyone. Everyone and every company is entitled to celebrate the holidays as they see fit. At Icarus Independent, it’s Christmas. I’ve never been a fan of supressing my beliefs just because someone else can’t tolerate them and gets offended because someone doesn’t believe the same thing they do. People like that are simply intolerant and judgemental. It is not tolerant to tolerate other people only so long as they don’t express differing opinions from you. If other sites want to plug other holidays, that’s their business.
Christmas is alive and well in the corporate world. It just has to share some air time with other beliefs.
The new Narnia movie is excellent. I saw the BBC version years ago and recently picked up the DVD box set for $25 at Best Buy. I can see why they released in on DVD before the movie came out. The special effects in the original movie were very cheesy with hand drawn cartoons for mythical creatures. At least they tried to blend in the animation with the live action. They did the best they could to make the cartoons look “real.” There’s only so much you can do with 1980’s technology. The new version’s special effects are top notch. Aslan no longer speaks like a badly dubbed foreign film. His mouth is fully animated like you’d expect from modern computer animation.
Plot wise, I didn’t see any obvious changes from the original movie which was very true to the book. The original movie was nearly three hours long which the new version is a little less than two and a half hours even with a much expanded battle scene. What they did it seems was simply to pace the movie better. The original was very drawn out while this movie keeps moving along. It was a very faithful retelling of the story which isn’t what I’ve come to expect from Hollywood so I was very pleasantly surprised. I even recognized some of the shots as been virtually identical to the original movie. I did like the original witch better. The witch in this movie was played by someone who didn’t seem to do “mean” very well.
Apparently in the early 1990’s Paramount was looking to make a version set in California. Fortunatly better judgment ruled the day and the project was canned.
Things to notice. The Professor is played by the same person who played Zidler in Moulin Rouge. The witch’s sled driver is the same person who played the oompa loompa in the new Willy Wonka movie.
Definitly worth seeing at least once. I’m hoping they do as well with the other books in the series.
The redesign of DevCenter has been started. It is now possible to preview up to 64KB of files. This will make it much easier for Google to index the site properly. There’s still a lot of work to be done but this is a good start.
DevCenter has to be the ugliest section of IcarusIndie.com. I think this will be the first section to get a makeover when I get a chance. I’ll also be adding a lot more files to the site. The latest Linux Kernel source is currently being added. I plan to add additional popular open source projects to the section. By the end of the year I’m going to try to break 1 million files. The latest count is over 400,000. In addition to being a large resource, the other purpose of this is to test the limits of mySQL.
A century-old painting commemorating the Pilgrims’ landing in Provincetown, Massachusetts, no longer hangs in the town hall after city officials voted that its was discriminatory against women. The Boston Globe reports that town Selectwoman Sarah Peake said she found it “disturbing” that the large oil painting — depicting the Pilgrims voting on the Mayflower Compact — didn’t include a single woman. Despite the fact that only male colonists actually signed the historic document, three of the four selectmen agreed to remove the painting, which had hung in the town hall for at least 60 years.
Who cares about accuracy when being politically correct is at stake.
Redesigned Flight 93 memorial still an Islamo-fascist shrine
The redesigned flight 93 memorial, announced today, still contains all of the features that made it a terrorist memorial. Architect Paul Murdoch’s infamous red crescent is still there, still planted with red maple trees, still inscribed in the exact same circle as before, and with the same two crescent tips still intact. Thus the crescent bisector defined by these crescent tips is also the same as before. It still points almost exactly to Mecca, making the crescent a Mihrab (an Islamic prayer station, where the believer faces into a crescent, towards Mecca, to perform his ritual prostrations). The design still incorporates a separate upper terrorist-memorial wall, centered precisely on the red-maple crescent. There are still 44 translucent blocks on the flight path to the crash site, matching the total number of dead, instead of just the forty translucent blocks that are dedicated to the forty murdered Americans. Lastly, the Tower of Voices part of the memorial is still an Islamic prayer-time sundial.
I think it’s time to fire this “artist” and bring in someone with talent.
My goal for AdSense last month was met even with the server down a couple days. This month’s goal is to break $250. To meet this goal, a lot of work is going to be done to improve the various sections of Icarus Independent. I want to make things more user friendly and better looking.
Every once in awhile I venture into anti-religion territory
From Religious Freaks
“Ok, let’s go down this route and assume that there is a “designer”. Then this designer must be a complex and intelligent being. Well Harold just stated that anything complex must have a designer. So by his own logic, who the hell designed the designer? Well obviously something intelligent. But who designed that designer? It can go on indefinitely. This theory lacks any form of substance and relies on the ignorance of humanity.”
It could. But it stops at God. God is eternal, uncreated. Where did this highly complex singularity come from that the Big Bang relies on?
I’ve seen this argument before. With the Matrix no less. People were bitching that the final Matrix introduced a third plane of existance. They were fine with 2 but when the third was introduced they decided that there must be an infinite number of planes. I see. So you can deal with 2 planes of existance but any more than two is proof of infinity. No, there are exactly three. There could be more but there’s no indication of that from the movies. There was the fake world that man created the world that man lives in and the world that man goes to. Kind of like the world we live in.
In this same way, God is the uncreated creator. Everything else must be created. Real mind bending stuff. Even in the Big Bang theory something is eternal, uncreated. They claim it was a singularity. Religious people call it God.
It’s this lack of stopping skills that led to the fairy tale of evolution to begin with. Charles Darwin saw a duck in the middle of the road and assumed it must have traveled millions of years and started as a single cell to get there. Meanwhile, it had just wandered from the farm close by.
Nobody disputes that things change. The dispute is simply over the starting point.