What is this? They are saying Sarah Michelle Gellar is a republican. They provide no evidence however. Well I still have faith that Buffy, the character, isn’t (or wasn’t now) a member of the GOP. Well, SMG was always supposed to be somewhat of a bitch. Via N.Z. Bear.

Radley has posted a column that was rejected at Fox News about Ashcroft.

Why was Senator Ashcroft so sympathetic to the ?states? rights? cause when it came to issues like the Confederacy and segregation, but when it comes whether or not a terminal cancer patient ought to be able to ease his pain with a marijuana cigarette, Attorney General Ashcroft can?t let the states govern themselves?

I have heard this kind of thing said about Ashcroft before. If he isn’t a bigot and is just insistent on protecting states rights, then why has he challenged states rights on everything he has disagreed with from the death penalty to medical marijuana?
I think Ashcroft is possibly the worst thing about the Bush administration, and he has serious competition. When I lived in St. Louis I had the distinct pleasure of voting against him (for governor against Mel Carnahan who beat him in that race and again in 2000 for senator even after Carnahan died).

Weight: 184.0lbs

This represents a 8.5lb drop from when I first started measuring on 5/16 (which was almost a week after I started the diet and exercise. There is a consistent downward trend too.

I still don’t have measuring tape for my waist yet but it is noticeably loose on my size 38 pants, which were tight at the beginning.

I have been working out a lot particularly at the NYU gym (where I am a member since I am an alum due to the one semester I spent there) since the weather has been so shitty. I have swam a lot since it exercises the whole body and I don’t want to feel intimidated going into an ocean with large waves this summer. I also had one great workout with my friend H_____ playing racquetball.

Two weeks are up so I began adding a few nuts to my diet (and I have had about 5 macadamia nuts so far). I am going to stay on induction for a while since I have quite a bit of weight to lose.

I just cooked some truly delicious Thai Basil Chicken. I was surprised at how well it came out. I also checked and it is totally compliant with Atkins.

It has been a week so far. I have been dieting and trying to thin up my fat ass for one week. I have also decided to write about it in this weblog to give myself a good written record of my progress. The idea of fitness blogging was partially inspired by Jim Henley.

I am on the Atkins Diet mostly and I am currently about halfway through Induction, the first and strictest stage. I am also trying to get regular exercise: Pushups and sit-ups most days and I have already been running twice. (Very different than my normal behavior).

While I am on Atkins, I plan on using many of the monitoring techniques developed by John Walker for the Hacker’s Diet. On of the key advantages is that it takes a weighted average of your weights, which gives you a better idea of your trend than individual weigh points do (individual points can fluctuate quite a bit).

I, like everyone else, learned a lot about Atkins from this article What if it’s all been a big fat lie? by Gary Taubes which originally appeared in the New York Times sunday Magazine. It was quite an eye opener. Further research found more studies backing up the Atkins diet, although many doctors and nutritionists are still skeptical. Both scientific and anecdotal evidence shows that people seem to lose weight effectively and fairly quickly with a low carbohydrate diet.

However, the most important factors in my decision were the food that Atkins dieters eat and the fact they are not usually hungry all the time. My boss calls Atkins a “man’s diet” since dieters consume food often associated with men such as red meat. I will certainly miss breads, cakes, cookies, beer and especially chocolate, but I can certainly find plenty to eat.

So far one of the largest benefits of this diet has been the fact that it has forced me to cook since I can no longer order from the local Chinese place (or Vietnamese or pizza or most Japanese). Just over the past week, with the help of the excellentHow to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman and some friends, I have cooked several things from a truly phenomenal pork chop, to broiled flounder to a grilled chicken with thai spices. One of the great things about Atkins is that there is no limit to the spices you can use (provided no sugar or starch is involved), so there are a lot of meal possibilities. I still want to explore new herbs like basil, new meats such as lamb and some shellfish.

So how is the diet working out? Fine. I have had a few cravings for muffins or cookies, but nothing strong enough to even think about acting on. I haven’t gotten the famed energy boost, but I am hardly beat. My workouts have been going well and I feel the diet is helping me.

So now to do the numbers. I got a scale on Thursday, so I started weighing myself on Friday morning.

Date	Weight (lbs)
5/16	192.0
5/17	190.5
5/18	189.0
5/19	188.0

Not a bad looking trend.

I also finally snapped some “before” pictures of myself. I am a week into the diet already, but I am definitely still enough of a fat ass to get adequate “before” pictures:

Pictures are unretouched and were taken a few hours before posting this entry. No face yet. These pictures are embarrassing enough without my head on them. I may include my whole body once I have a suitable “after” photo.

I wanted to control iTunes using the keyboard even when iTunes isn’t the front program. I tend to leave my entire music collection (11.03 GB, 7 days and getting larger) to play on random so I end up going through a lot of songs. I usually have iTunes playing music in the background as I work or play using other programs. I usually command-tab over to iTunes and use the arrow keys, but I would rather not leave the application I am working in.

I wanted to assign the backward, play/pause, and forward buttons to my F13, F14 and F15 keys, since they are in a nice group of three separate from the other function keys, but it turns out that F14 and F15 are used to darken and brighten my screen. So I decided to assign them to F10, F11 and F12 which are above the delete key on the upper right of the main keyboard. Its not too bad since F12, which is the easiest to reach by feel, is the one I will hit most often.

I had to write these simple applescripts:

tell application "iTunes"
	back track
end tell

tell application "iTunes"
	playpause
end tell

tell application "iTunes"
	next track
end tell

Toughest scripting I’ve ever done.

I also had to assign these scripts to the function keys. This is something I thought was part of the system, but you need additional software, at least in OSX. Scripts can easily be assigned to function keys in OS9, but I rarely use 9 at home. There are two software options:

• QuickKeys
• iKey(formerly Youpi Key)

QuickKeys is a commercial product ($100 too). iKey used to be free and now it is shareware, but it seems to perform fine without registration and there are no nag screens. If you can’t guess I downloaded iKey. It is a fairly nice clean program. I simply assigned the scripts to the function keys and it works as advertised. I got this info from this macosxhints article.

Krugman, my favorite columnist, has a column today about how the American media has become very pro-U.S. Government. He points out that:

A funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view ? something they couldn’t find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC’s director general, “wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality.”

His point was that a privately owned news organization can often be more likely to repeat the state line than a state owned news organization such as the BBC.

I am just glad someone in our mainstream media is actually pointing out how we are getting very different news from people abroad (although to be fair the Times is doing a much better job than many others). I heard a story (I think it was on NPR, but I am not sure) about how different the content of CNN America is from CNN International. The U.S. version is much more pro-administration and pro-war where the International version is more skeptical.

Tom Tomorrowalso has a comic about media bias.

I hope that we can finally put this Liberal media myth to rest.

Bob Harris (@ This Modern World) and Kos have reported that rather than let the Rebublicans pass a horrid redistricting bill they have refused to show up.

They have skipped the state. The govenor has apparently sent the state troopers after them, but the troopers are powerless outside the state. As Kos reports, New Mexico refuses to cooperate. The lawmakers turned up in Oklahoma, where authorities also refuse to turn them over.

They are being called everything from “heroes” to “cowards” and have picked up the nicknames “Chicken Ds” and “Killer Ds”. Clearly they took an extreme measure, but given the Republican’s recent behavior, a reasonable action to take.

From apple:

AAC files encoded from a source other than the iTunes Music Store (such as an audio CD) work the same as an MP3 file encoded from the same source. No authorization required to play or burn them. So, AAC files you encode yourself in iTunes 4 can be burned more than ten times per playlist and can be played on more than three computers.

Good. I want to encode more CDs for backup and playing from my computer. I would like to switch from mp3s to AACs, since the AACs are of higher quality for the same sized file, but I was concerned about DRM limitations. To be honest, the limitations you get from the itunes music store are fairly limited, but if I am creating them myself I want maximum flexibility. I may start ripping all my CDs now.

Oh and by the way I have tried the itunes store. I have only downloaded 5 tracks so far, mostly because I am horribly indecisive. It looks promising though.

Link via this comment in macosxhints.

Today I just go a bunch of prints that I had ordered through iphoto. These prints came from a Kodak subsidiary, Ofoto. The prints came in the mail two days after I ordered them. They looked fantastic.

The prints were very glossy, quite thin and had a great continuos tone quality. They were cheap too: $1 for a 5”x7” and $3 for an 8”x10”. I printed them from highly manipulated photoshop images which Colin (my primary employer) shot. They nearly matched inkjet prints I made for quality, and were about the same price. What you get with the inkjet prints is quick feedback and more variety of papers you can use.

The only thing I worry about is that this is a consumer oriented service. I hope they don’t try to do any sort of automated correction. I also hope their prints are consistent. One of the great advantages of digital photography is that you can get the same print from a saved file without having to make all the alterations again.

I looked online and found other services like this one. One of the most promising looked to be printroom.com. They have a specific service for professional photographers, they won’t apply any automatic correction if you ask and their prices seem reasonable. They will even use ICC profiles, which means they are likely serious about good consistent color.

I only found a a few reviews of these services online. None are from major sources like magazines, but I think I trust an individual reviewer more. I guess I will probably have to test some of these services out. Shouldn’t be hard; they’re pretty cheap.

I talked previously about the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) efforts to control how you buy and listen to music. They are not alone. The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) would like to tell you just how you can view television and movies. There is no big new news on this, but I thought it was worth discussing.

The first impetus for this new desire to seize control is digital television. The FCC wants to start broadcasting digitally which will free up parts of the radio spectrum which it can then auction off. They want to cease analog broadcasts in 2006, but in a strange bout of common sense, they wanted to make sure 85% of all households had a digital capable TV first. This is clearly not going to be met; not even close. Part of the reason is that manufactures, hollywood, and the FCC can’t agree on how to implement DTV. Hollywood wants make it restrictive and difficult to copy; manufactures don’t really want to add a new component to their TVs which would cost money to make, and the FCC just wants to get this out the door.

The second impetus is HDTV. Hollywood thinks that it can put even more restrictions on your media if it gives you a plum like higher definition. This is similar to the situations with DVDs, which are much harder to copy than videotape, but offer better quality and more features.

The third impetus is Napster the file trading phenomenon. The movie and television industry could plainly see what happened to the music industry and is desperate to avoid it. Of course the movie industry has a lot less to fear. While movies and TV shows are traded now, they are much larger files of very low quality – usually worse than VHS tape. We have the technology to make these now and it isn’t going away. However people watch movies in a very different way than they listen to music. Movies require your full attention and are usually watched only a few times. Music, on the other hand is often listened to over and over again. Most people find it easier to walk down the street and pay three dollars to rent a tape or DVD than spending hours online for a huge, low quality video file. Few people also have the patience and know-how to encode a movie either, while almost everyone can easily convert a CD to mp3s quickly and easily.

One of the things hollywood wants to do is institute a “broadcast flag” which attaches to all shows broadcast telling you exactly what you can do with it. For example you may be able to copy one show and hold onto it for 14 days, another you can copy, but only once, and a third you wouldn’t be able to copy at all. The “no-copy” flags would probably start out on one-time, heavily copied programming such as a boxing match on HBO or the world series. However it would likely migrate to a finale or “special episode” of a sitcom, and probably eventually to nearly everything.

Of course in order to enforce such restrictions they have to gain control of the equipment we use to watch their content. They are trying to do just that through legislation. For example they got Sen Fritz Hollings (D-SC) to propose the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), which is thankfully now dead. It would have mandated how any TV, VCR or even computer could be built to appease hollywood.

They are, of course, still trying to gain that sort of control. One of the reasons DTV is being so held up is because of hollywood’s insistence that they have enough control over people’s viewing habits. Hollywood insisted that any device follow the instructions given by the broadcast flags and other DRM (digital rights management) technology, and be tamper proof to normal consumers (a near impossibility given the availability of cheap tools).

The manufactures tried to establish some sort of standards that hollywood would like, and formed the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG). The movie studios insisted that they pre-approve every product before release, but that clearly isn’t going to happen. It is currently being worked out. Luckily the EFF (electronic frontier foundation) in getting involved and chronicling it on behalf of consumers.

The new focus seems to be on the “analog hole,” which the EFF talks about here. The basic idea is anything that I can see and hear I can re-digitize and do anything I want with, which is heresy to hollywood. They are trying to have people own as few uncontrolled analog devices as possible, difficult with all the TVs and VCRs out there that no one wants to give up. They also want to create restrictive watermarks on analog material and enforce their use through laws, coercion and other restrictions.

I can’t believe with all this potential for this great technology, we have to wait for hollywood to cripple it severely before we see any of it. This is the same group that tried to get VCRs outlawed and now makes more money from them than they do from theaters. They want to create a closed system that caters to their paranoid delusions. Any system will be defeated by determined pirates, but regular consumers will be treated like criminals with severely restricted equipment.

A good, if somewhat dated article, is here. These issues are also constantly discussed on slashdot.

I get up on a nice sunday morning and find out that the RIAA wants to hack into my computer; you know, put an unauthorized program on my computer that scans the hard disk for files it feels are illegal and erases them, maybe locks up on me when I try to run iTunes or something, and possibly throttle my internet connection which is clearly used for nefarious purposes. Of course there is a Slashdot discussion on this too.

There is this gem:

Among the more benign approaches being developed is one program, considered a Trojan horse rather than a virus, that simply redirects users to Web sites where they can legitimately buy the song they tried to download.

That’s one of the more “benign” approaches? Running unauthorized code on my computer that tells me exactly how I should be using my internet connection. But wait, there’s more:

A more malicious program, dubbed “freeze,” locks up a computer system for a certain duration ? minutes or possibly even hours ? risking the loss of data that was unsaved if the computer is restarted. It also displays a warning about downloading pirated music. Another program under development, called “silence,” scans a computer’s hard drive for pirated music files and attempts to delete them. One of the executives briefed on the silence program said that it did not work properly and was being reworked because it was deleting legitimate music files, too.

I can’t even begin to describe the problems with this.

Apparently there are companies such as Overpeer and MediaDefender (warning: major propaganda behind that link) who are developing this software to sell to the RIAA and others. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about with script kiddies and malicious crackers who do this stuff just for fun. Now I have to deal with well funded efforts with several employees. Got forbid some of this code leaks out.

Luckily I’ve got an OS X mac, which is better designed to prevent this intrusiveness and is also much less likely to be targeted.

Of course most of this is clearly illegal and I am surprised the RIAA is even considering doing this in such a sue happy culture. It isn’t just a bunch of kids and twenty year olds who are going to be pissed off. What happens when a major law partner looses his work due to his kid’s adventures on Kazaa? Or what about the network providers who don’t want their pipelines throttled or monitored? According to the article Verizon is already expressing concern.

Not that the RIAA isn’t trying to get laws passed that allows this stuff. Not that these laws are likely to be vague or open to abuse or anything.

Jim Henley has an interesting post discussing Kos’ earlier post about how the Democrats can attract libertarian (with a small l) voters. He has this advice:

let the Dems put as much real energy into getting rid of big government they supposedly don’t like as adding big government they do. Campaign on ending the drug war and mean it. Dismantle corporate welfare instead of engaging in it. Restore the personal income tax exemption to its level in 1948 dollars while eliminating all or most itemized deductions. Promise to repeal all or most of the USA-PATRIOT Act, the RAVE Act and the DMCA. Stand as firmly for free trade as Clinton did. A party that did these things would still be very much a liberal party. Hell, it would be a more liberal party than the Dems are now. It would still support regulation and tax policies that libertarians hate, but it would have a credible claim to be Kos’s “party of personal liberty” in the non-economic sphere. If the Republicans did not clean up their own act, it would be a damned hard Democratic Party to say “no thanks” to.

I couldn’t agree more (except maybe the part about the taxes which I confess I don’t fully understand). This is exactly what the Democrats need. I am admittedly a libertarian leaning liberal, but I believe this could attract both liberals and libertarians to vote Democratic. Unfortunately the Democrats don’t have half enough balls to talk about even some of these ideas.

… after a bit of a break. Been busy doing work; but look for some new Tech postings about some things I’ve learned. I have still had time to see what other bloggers have been up to.

We celebrated Loyality Day a few days ago, and everyone is talking about it. The most informative I have found is here. Even a conservative is “ …trying, but [he] can’t justify this”.” (I got the informative link from said conservative.)

I also watched this brilliant Bush vs. Bush debate on the always brilliant Daily Show with Jon Stewart and now everyone in blogistan is talking about it.

Calpundit continues to provide interesting graphs notably this one about global terror.

In the making fun of Bush department we have this via Atrios and this via instapundit, who surprisingly I agree with in his assessment of Bush’s carrier landing / speech, despite the fact that seemingly all his readers seem to be trying to convince him otherwise.

More folks are ganging up on the gay bashing Stanley Kurtz. Via Radley Balko who has some interesting things to add.

Also national scold Bill Bennett’s gambling problem, via Tom Tommorow, Atrios, and Calpundit.

Finally, please check out this this commercial for Honda from the U.K. (requires flash 6, here is the ad from Honda’s site with a longer access time). The great Bob Garfield gave it 4 of 4 stars. Via Making Light and Alas, a Blog.