I hate the tv

Irony has fallen back through itself here in the Lower Greenville neighborhood of Dallas.  Today I witnessed perhaps the most active protest I have seen in my two years living in the Dallas area.  As I approached I wondered what could be the subject:  Is it the war? gas prices? food prices?  Is it the bad economy? Genocide in Sudan? Human rights violations in China? Human rights violations here in the US?!? Wiretapping?

No. My heart sank and my brain began to hurt as I realized that these people are out protesting to save……a Starbucks store. This particular one:

Prior to today I was only aware that anti-Starbucks protests occurred. This is through the looking glass people
-Glen

Some other stuff:
A map and the official list of closing stores across the US. Some other slightly different starbucks centric protests.

Starbucks location in Berlin behind the Brandeburg gate.
 The onions take on the news

Youtube, today I realized, contains a plethora of funny live news outtakes. Whether its the fox news perverts slipping up or rowdy bystanders (ahahaha) harassing the reporters…there’s a lot of giggles to be had.

And of course, let’s not forget about these pre-YouTube classics: QVC and grapes

Dorks have created a perfect Checkers playing computer named Chinook. You can apparently play against it here, though at the time of this writing, its server is slammed into submission.

” The proof required analyzing 500 billion billion checkers positions — 5 x 10²⁰ — a computational process that began in 1989 and has been running on hundreds of processors almost continuously since.”
…Well I’ll be damned.

(thx salon.com)

Here’s a cool magazine based on the idea of collecting stuff from other people. They have notes, pictures, drawings, diary entries, love letters, etc. Very cool idea and it looks good.

There’s also a separate site for their “dirty” material…like this pretty tame example:

which is very amusing…but not worksafe.

From the amount of publicity it’s gotten, the Exxon Valdez could easily be thought to be the largest oil spill in history. Actually, it’s only the 53rd largest according to this page. Coming in at 11 million gallons, it seems puny compared to the largest spill, 240 million gallons spilt off the coast of Kuwait in 1991. Also of note is the second largest, 140 MG spilled on the gulf coast of Mexico June 3rd, 1979.

Thinking about it, this could be the source of the black tar spots (like the one shown above) that I knew to be common along the South and Central Florida coast that I knew growing up. At the beach access bridges, where we’d walk over the sand dunes, there were always little stations with kerosein which were to be used to get the tar off the bottom of your feet. It seemed so natural…

The Changing World from the BBC had a moving piece by Vera Frankl on kids who were tried as adults under the whole “get tough on crime” political fad of the 1980 and 90s. Part two of the piece hit much closer to home as it covers the situation of four guys who are serving terms of life in prison for things from accidental homicide to attempted robbery in which someone else in the robbing party shot and killed someone. One of the 16 year olds helped a friend who killed his abusive mother try to cover up that crime.

For these men sentences as boys, there is apparently no hope of parole and no hope of review of their case. Once the decision was made by the DA to try these kids as adults, there is no going back. They are also kept in the same maximum security prisons that adults are. Children as young as 14 can end up in with adult murders!

After hearing this piece, I feel there’s a need for a review of this system. There should at least be a chance for the case and sentence to be reviewed after 10 years or so. As the sister Jennifer of one of the prisoners, Trevor Jones, points out: “I still keep in touch with a lot of my childhood friends; nobody is the same person that they were when they were 16. You change, you change so much. So of course [Trevor] is not the same person [now]. How could he be”.

@ The Changing World
Download the MP3s directly here:

Part 1: This issue in Pakistan

Part 2: This issue in Colorado
Web Version

The one who calls himself Matt, apparantly, has created a Bee Gees tribute album, available for free mp3 download. “Hey” as performed by Prince is especially good:

Who says the RIAA needs to be involved to get your jam on.

I remember being amused the first time my dad told me about the Three Rules of Real Estate: “Location, Location, Location!” I was somewhere in my teenage years and I thought of how clever it was, and it was very true in my native south Florida. But that doesn’t seem to hold here in Texas to my amazement. I’ve been scouting around for some investment properties around Dallas and Richardson (city immediately north of Dallas). What I’ve found is that Dallas is subject to some very serious “White Flight”.

I’d say it would actually be more accurate to describe it as middle class New Money flight. Some people here in Texas want new more than anything. More than location, more than convenience, more than community. I’ve tried to understand it and I don’t get it. While I want something convenient, with an established community, people here seem to just want brand spanking new.

I find it surprising that people seem to have this goal in life….to pay some asshole developer 150k dollars profit to turn a cornfield (green below)…

…into a zero-lot line house (the parking lot shapes above) in an insanely regular subdivision out in the middle of nowhere. Basically to air condition 3000 square feet of a 5000 square foot lot, with just enough room outside to park a couple of 40 thousand dollar trucks (that is a daily driver to work 30 miles away) and a big fucking stainless steel grill from the Home Depot and a few lawn chairs. Pink flamingos wouldn’t be far off, but I guess that market has gotten squashed by the post-911 American flag craze and rubber truck balls.

So I got to wondering, if you get one of these 2000 square foot McMansions for 200 grand….(Click on them for more info from Zillow.com)…

…What do you get for a million bucks? If the land value is practically zero, you should get a whole bunch…..well Here’s some of the ones I could find:

Not bad: 6000 square feet, 6br/4.5 bath and all a hop skip and a jump (32miles one way) away from downtown Dallas

Next up is so new, it doesn’t show up in the satellite photo, Old Sandy:

Okay, this one isn’t quite a million. Just a modest 785k today: A modest 8000 square foot property built in 2005 on the Appropriately named “Kings Lake Road”.

And finally here’s one from over to the West some: Coppell, Tx…(The above were in McKinney)

A comfy little 6/6, 7700sf on 2.0 Acres. Located conveniently 20 miles from downtown dallas and 30 miles from Fort worth.

Maybe I’m just saying this because I don’t have a million dollars to spare (or at all), but I think I can find better things to do with my money than that.
-Glen

So Google talk rolled out an interesting feature a while back, to show your friends which song your playing…You can see it here…

Well they use it to track what people are playing and rank music using it.

It seems pretty cool, so I’m not totally against it, but I bet a lot of people don’t know this is going on. And it’s important to remember that this user information is turned directly into money by companies like google.

I didn’t see them mention this to me when doing the software update. Software license agreements are all hocus pocus….click here and we’ll make the hundreds of pages of nasty legalese go away so you can just use the damn program. At least google’s got some blurb up about how you opt-in and opt-out. They’re pretty cool about that.

Ahahhaa

I don’t know WHAT this is; but it’s pretty fun. The end is amazing.

update 3/8/2008: the video was removed from gootube. Here’s some information on this brilliant animation.