I was cutting my hair today when it occurred to me that I’ve been buzzing my dome since I was a freshman in college. For those of you playing along on the home game, that was thirteen years ago. Soon I will have been officially balding for longer in my life than when I had hair. Actually, if I add in the first year or two of my life, perhaps I’ve been bare-pated longer already.

Anyway, instead of reaching for a can of hair or other hair-replacement nonsense, my thoughts drifted to how much money I would have spent if I still needed to visit the barber. I trim my hair back every three weeks. By my estimation, not including times when I was overzealous and cut my hair every two weeks, or lazy and waited a full month, I’ve self-trimmed almost 235 times. I know that’s incorrect, but it’s good enough for today’s post. Using a benchmark of $20 per trim (including tip), that’s $4700USD I would have spent having my hair professionally cut.

While I definitely miss the hot water and shampoo scalp massage, I can think of quite a few things I’d rather buy with $4700.

Okay, here’s the challenge:

You are sending out a space probe, with the hopes that it will one day encounter intelligent life. Like the Voyager Golden Record, the idea is that you must convey significant aspects of yourself or your life’s history on one disc. Since this isn’t the 70s, we’re going to use a single 80 minute CD as our medium.

You can either select songs that describe you, or describe your history/upbringing, or both. For my part, I selected songs that described my personality. Here’s the list, in no particular order:

• N.E.R.D. and Zero 7 – Provider
  Name says it all, but this track is about a guy who does whatever he needs to to pay the bills.
• Rage Against the Machine – Year of the Boomerang
  What goes around comes around — I remember listening to this in college almost every day right before an English course where we conducted a peer-review on the weekly papers we wrote.
• DJ Shadow – Building Steam With a Grain of Salt
  Sometimes you have to make something from nothing, or rather, as the point of this song, pull together something big from chaos.
• Cirrus – No Pressure
  “Everybody wants to sing along, but they never have my kind of blues.” A great tune when I just want to sing to myself alone in the car.
• Disturbed – Land of Confusion
  Yeah fuckers, I know the original is by Genesis, and that Phil Collins is supposed to be lame, but it was a great song when it came out and it’s even better with Disturbed’s hard edge. News flash: the world is fatally askew, and sometimes realizing there isn’t anything I can do about it keeps me from flying off the handle.
• Anthrax – Antisocial
  Well, it’s Anthrax. And it’s about being … antisocial. v0v
• Linkin Park – In the End
  Sometimes things fall apart no matter what you try to do. At least take it gracefully.
• Juno Reactor – Guardian Angel
  Madonna once said that the problem with techno music is that it doesn’t have a soul. Some groups, like Juno Reactor, defy that convention.
• Guns N Roses – Rocket Queen
  After listening to this song a billion times over the years, I’m still not entirely sure what it’s about. I am sure, however, that the first two lines really resonate with me. So it’s on the list.
• Public Enemy – War at 33 1/3
  PE has a ton of great songs (including “Bring the Noise,” also included), but this one track epitomizes Chuck D’s blistering vocals — both in speed and in spirit — along with PE’s overarching aural assault.
• Rage Against the Machine – Pistol Grip Pump
  I don’t know what to say on this one. I just get a guttural feeling from this song.
• Limp Bizkit – Break Stuff
  If you’ve ever seen me bonk my head on an open refrigerator door or struggle with something mechanical, you know exactly why this song is here.
• Korn – Faget
  Fantastic song off of Korn’s first album about someone who’s different and has had enough of being picked on. It’s a soundtrack for vengeance.
• Lamb – Gabriel
  You can’t be a toughguy all the time. Or even most of the time. This song makes me want to cry every time I hear it.
• Anthrax and Public Enemy – Bring the Noise
  At a time when the only other rock-rap cross over was the comedic “Walk This Way” by Aerosmith and Run DMC, Bring the Noise demonstrated five white guys could throw down with one of hip hop’s baddest ensembles.
• Rob Base – It Takes Two
  I can’t help but join in any time this song comes on.

So, what would be on your Golden CD? You don’t have to give reasons if you don’t want to, just try to fit everything within 80 minutes. Have fun!

If you browse long enough on the Internet, you’ll find some crazy ass shit. I was reading a forum on the Star Wars PocketModel game, and someone made a side-comment about Endor being destroyed by fallout from the second Death Star. That lead to another Web page about the different theories about the aftermath of Return of the Jedi, which led me a completely over-researched yet engrossing study entitled: “The Truth About the Endor Holocaust’” by Gary M. Sarli. Written in the summer of 2004, Sarli attempts to disprove the idea of an Endor Holocaust using physics, images from the Return of the Jedi movie, and canonical and official source material.

I found two things interesting about Sarli’s thesis. The first was, “holy fuck, someone put a lot of time into this.” The second thing that impressed me was how methodical Sarli was, from determining what the cutoff point was for establishing a bit of information as valid (including what constituted an acceptable variance in the size of the second Death Star) to analyzing screen captures from the movie on a pixel-by-pixel basis. There is a fair amount of statistical analysis in the document, as well as incredibly detailed discussions about relative and absolute size of objects in the movie, and how those objects are used to extrapolate additional information. I think the most mind-bending part of the thesis was the math behind how it was not accurate to use a screenshot of the second Death Star from outside the Millennium Falcon’s forward viewport.

Even though this is old news if you’re a Star Wars geek, I figured it was interesting enough to post. There are a few math-minded Gibberish readers and they may appreciate (or perhaps critique) the methodology Sarli uses to draw his conclusion. For me, the document was another example of how no matter how crazy and obscure a topic is, the Internet will have at least one expert on it.

I’m going to be honest. My Motorola E815 was working flawlessly. It was almost cosmetically perfect. It did everything I wanted it to, except it was lacking a little bit of the sexy. The camera sucked, but I wasn’t aiming to become the Ansel Adams of mobile phones. Everything was great, until Lady Jaye bought her Samsung u740 at Verizon Wireless as part of her New Every Two plan.
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Three weeks after her adoption, Pearl has fit into the family quite nicely. After being afraid of her for the first week or so, Rosie has taken to Pearl like a true big sister. The two are mostly inseparable now. They cuddle together, run outside together, and do chores together, such as digging a bomb shelter in the backyard for mommy and daddy. Pearl now weighs in at 24.4 pounds, up over six pounds since we got her.

Pictures after the jump.
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My body has built up a resistance to most things Star Wars over the years. I used to search out — and receive — all sorts of Star Wars stuff, from toys to Pez dispensers, to limited edition cels of the movie. After being disappointed in the new trilogy films and unimpressed with video game offerings such as Jedi Knight and the Lego Star Wars series, With the exception of the original Knights of the Republic game on the Xbox, I’ve been able to turn a blind eye to most of Lucas’ marketing attempts. I don’t read the books that are cranked out one after the other, nor do I pay much attention to the reissued toys that I owned as a child. However, I was unable to escape the Siren’s call of the Star Wars PocketModel collectible card game. Damn you for telling me about this, Bond. :)
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Happy birthday to my buddy Donut, my favorite police officer in training (please don’t write me a ticket). You may remember that I interviewed D back in January as he was about to enter the police academy. I hope to conduct another interview once he graduates.

Happy birthday!

As a typical virtual citizen, I have about fifty hojillion accounts across fifty hojillion Web sites and networks. I try to recycle the same four or five usernames, and use about seven different passwords. My passwords vary depending on when I created the account, if the site has any requirements (such as no special characters, or must contain at least one number, password length, etc), and if I feel like the site is Super Important™. Even though I have a transponder that generates unique passkeys for eBay and PayPal, the root passwords for those places are not in use in any other Web site or application.

The problem that developed was that I couldn’t keep track of what password and username combination went with what site. I was also running the risk of someone being able to access multiple accounts if just one database was cracked or user:pass combo intercepted/divined. If someone was able to determine the username and password for an EVE Online forum, they may be able to get into my stock trading site account (not an actual example). I wanted to diminish the number of shared passwords I had on different sites, and keep track of all my usernames and passwords. After some preliminary research on the Ars Technica forums, I selected KeePass.
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From Ars Technica: Internet radio royalty rates are not going to go up as expected — at least, not yet anyway. This announcement was made during a Congressional discussion. SoundExchange, the entity responsible for collecting the increased fees, announced that they would attempt to negotiate something more reasonable with Webcasters.

The royalty increase has been a big issue to me. Not only do I listen to Internet radio for most of the day while I work from home, but one of my good friends BushPutin is employed over at Pandora. BushPutin said that Pandora did not have plans to fold up immediately on the 15th, and was still hiring and maintained their operating budgets. He was still concerned about the impact of the fee increase, and believed that Pandora would hit the proposed rate cap of 2500 stations due to Pandora’s “create-your-own” station format.

In preparation of losing some of my favorite Internet radio stations, I have been recording Frisky Radio’s stream for the last twenty six hours. Thanks to this announcement, it looks like I can give my hard drive a rest.

That’s not my stripper stage name, that’s what I used to order at Chipotle. Chicken burrito with rice, black beans, corn salsa, and lettuce. Sure, the burrito weighs over a pound, but how bad could it possibly be?
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