Matt in a Tux

First and foremost, I heard the song Dear Kanye by Ben Sollee on the radio the other day. For those who do not know, Kanye made quite the ruckus at Bonnaroo by being very late for his show and then not appologizing. Also, for those who don't know, Kanye is a douche. I enjoy his music, but as a person, lets get serious.

So here is the Ben Sollee song addressing Kanye and his crazy antics:


I thought the song was amazing. A cellist records a song on his laptop microphone telling Kanye to straighten up. Epic.


In other news, my tooth hurts. Read: nasty headaches have been taking place. I have a dentist appointment for tomorrow. In the meantime, the secretary recommended that I take 800mg of Motrin for the pain. All I wanted was some Tylenol3 (codein has never failed me with pain), but no, this is what I get. Oh well.

I haven't updated for a few days, but for good reason. My hard drive decided to crash on me last Saturday night. Basically, I went out, came home, went to sleep, woke up, woke up the computer from the screensaver, and things were freezing. When trying to plug in my dying HDD to a Windows box, explorer would freeze. Ubuntu wouldn't even force mount it.

So now I had to call Dell. Luckily they weren't too bad. I explained that my HDD was failing, and, after about 30 minutes of run around, the tech sent me out a replacement drive.

Now I was worried about lost data. I found a nice liveCD that had solid ntfs support and would force mount to this failing partition. Its a handy, very simple, liveCD called SystemRescueCD. I recommend it for file moving in situations like this.

However, I was not able to find my outlook pst file and firefox profile. For some reason all my AppData couldn't be read. :(

Now I get the fun times of trying to remember my bookmarks and passwords that were stored in firefox. Sigh.

I'm going to cut this one short though on account of being busy trying to get my computer set back up and get some files moved around. But, I think I'll use the words of one of the better cartoon stars out there:

I just ran across an article saying how Apple has finally opened their "App store" where a user can download things such as games (at a price) or iTunes plug-ins apps. One of these apps is the remote application where you can control iTunes from your iPod touch or iPhone. This little bit got me thinking... Apple really has a way of controlling what you use for what purposes and with what certain hardware. Is this not a monopoly forming viz a viz the Microsoft anti-trust ruling?

• Apple software (OSX) on Apple hardware only.
• They control 80%+ of the digital music market with their hardware.
• Their music hardware (iPod) typically dictates the music software (iTunes) people will use.

They have an obvious monopoly based solely on the three aforementioned things. Is this wrong? Not by legal standards. But, from a consumer-welfare standpoint there are problems.

Apple works like any business: make more money than you spend. It is working well for them, and so far they are still innovating to bring more customers. However, as we have learned in the past, innovation does not happen as well without competition. As Apple eats up more of the consumer market share, it is quite easy to see them taking the same route as Microsoft with their anti-trust case.

Just as an example, take a look at how Apple was bundling Safari as a software update even when users did not have it preinstalled on their system. Seems fishy, no?

Just my two cents.

Manpris, i.e. capri pants for men, i.e. long shorts/short pants, have been a hot topic lately in my discussions with friends. First, this is what they look like: