Happy New Year

An obligatory Happy New Year to all! No resolutions for me, life carries on as usual and I continue trying (somewhat half-assed) to better myself.

But enough of that. Here's a few random things.

If you've not heard of Andy McKee, he's a composer and acoustic guitar player. Any way, I'd never heard of him until I saw this pretty cool video of him playing his song Drifting. It's neat because of the way he uses the guitar to provide the percussion to the song. But the intriguing way he plays was only a secondary thing to me. I really got into the song. So I listened to a few other snippets in iTunes from his album "Art of Motion" and found that I really liked it. It's labeled folk by iTunes, but to me its mostly soothing good music. I bought the album, and will be keeping an eye out for more.

Someone finally wrote a sigalert widget for the OS X dashboard. I say finally, because there are all sorts of traffic monitor widgets for every major metropolitan area in the U.S. except the the bay area. I can finally drop that Yahoo! Local traffic widget, because I really never used it. Also, this one would be worth dropping a couple bucks donation to the author just for kudos, but I refuse to use PayPal, so until something trustworthy comes along, all I can offer are my thanks.


Finally, just a quick rant. I was listening to NPR on the way home from work the other day, and they did a short piece on gas prices and how they are on the rise again, starting higher in '07 than they did in '06, despite Katrina, etc.. One of the themes that I heard at least twice in this piece as well as most other pieces like it done by other media outlets, is that us lowly consumers aren't really upset about the prices or are "accepting" them, because as they say, we keep driving our gas-guzzling cars, and we keep paying the piper for our magical go-liquid. Well, to that I can only muster a plebian "Fuck You". The consumers aren't complacent about, or accepting of the high gas prices: we have no goddamn choice. We're bent over the proverbial barrel. It's not like we can all drop our current cars (even if they are gas-guzzling beasts) for hybrids or natural gas, or magic beans our whatever alternative energy automobiles exist. For one, their way to damned expensive (relative to equivalent traditional gasoline engine automobiles), and unless its a hybrid, you're limited in your fueling options. I know I've never actually seen a hydrogen filling station, or a magic bean plant that people can just drive up to fill up, and drive off.. And we all certainly can't turn to public transportation for the simple fact that, most implementations of it are a clusterfuck and probably aren't any cheaper. Now, don't get me wrong, I like the fact that Talitha and I can walk down to the BART station and take the train into the city for the day, but I certainly can't do that to get to my job everyday, since actually doing so would require that I spend 3-4 hours a day commuting and just as much money on fares as I would spend on the bullshit high priced gasoline. I'm sure somewhere there's a buried news story or local reporter who is willing to point this out, but it seems to get glossed over by the society-programming idiot news media. That is all.