Orson Scott Card wrote a two part article titled MP3s are not the Devil. It really great, covers corporate ownership of copyrights, none expiration of copyrights (corps don't die), history repeating itself (music on radio, movies on VHS) and file sharing being word of mouth advertising.

Shareware music, listen first, pay second:
Mangatune [We are not evil] has a very small selection of artists who are selling their music in straight MP3 format. Albums cost $5 (plus how ever much more you feel like) and half goes directly to the artist. If you are an audiophile, songs are available as .wav so you don't lose any information.

You didn't hear this from me. Some guy was in Japan for their Penis festival and he took plenty of pictures. Smiling women included free of charge.

I'm sorry that this exists: Am I Period Or Not.com. Post your garb picture and get picked apart by internet dweebs and authenticity nazi's. The "New random pic" link doesn't work for me, just hit Reload to get a new pic. ( I think I broke their site. If it doesn't work, try back in a day or two.)

SCAtoday is a news site.

Stonekeep Armoury is, I believe, the guy who sold me my (still unused) mild steel knee cops for cheap. I invite my brothers to buy a set of knee cops and elbow cops from him. (I'm not a big fan of steel painted black, but it will be easier to care for. Get whichever you like.)

In the Stuff No One Cares About Department:
I changed my header and made it common throughout my site. The cool part is that the header links are now a seperate file. If I change that one file, the header changes everywhere. :)

I finally deleted everything on members.verizon.net. They lost some of my pictures, went down without warning or explaination and today that site, the out of date one, ranked higher then my new one. Sorry 'bout killing your bookmarks for good folks.

Verizon seems to have forgotten that one of the services I am paying for is space on their webserver. Additionally, I can't log in to my account using my browser of choice (Opera), I must use MS's Internet Explorer. After I login Verizon fails to respond when I click on "My Webspace" link. Fabulous. Next they'll sell my information to .NET against my will and without telling me.

The Commodore 64 was the first machine I went online with. 1200 baud modem!!! Literally faster then you can type! We had a tape drive (3rd pic), disk drive (3rd pic) and printer. We also had the predecessor, the Vic 20 and Way back in Tom's programming history was a Timex Sinclair. To make it do anything you had to connect the memory pack shown in the picture. Then anytime you touched the machine, the memory pack would fall out and you'd lose all your work.

The fellow who thought up the web, Tim Berners-Lee, has a new idea called The Semantic Web(article on Scientific American). Basically the World Wide Web Consortium (a think tank) is formulating a way to describe the information in a website to a computer. This will allow software to perform more complex tasks for us. Read the first page for a feel of the possible results (The good ones anyway.)

Scientific American has some articles available for free. Others (marked with a D in a box) only have the first couple paragraphs and a chance to subscribe for the rest.

I'm warming up my Java programming skills. Here's my version of Conway's Game of Life

Things my friend Hawk has learned in years of rescue work. Hawk's Sayings They're pretty darn funny.

The Monty Python: The Quest for the Holy Grail DVD is pretty freakin cool. We got it from the Colonie library. They have "Subtitles for people who didn't like the film" taken from Henry IV. Apparently they filmed the entire film in ONE castle. Scotland refused them.

I'm soliciting feedback on my Field Service Technician resume for a job with Dainippon Screens. Here's the job posting. I'll be sending it in as plain text, so I've left out the fancy HTML stuff on purpose. If you prefer, please feel free to comment in my guestbook

Someone came up my fire escape today, took out the screen and openned the window. He then said "Hello?" I replied from my bedroom "Hello" and got no response. A couple of Hello's later I got up to look and found the window open far enough to crawl through. The putz was trying to rob me! I reported it to the police and they tell me there's a bit of this going around now.

DynDNS.org bumped me for abuse. Apparently, my software is telling them my IP Address (like a phone number) too often. I seem to be back online with them, but I didn't change anything. We'll see what happens.

Jenny has been fired from Borders. Apparently the straw that broke their back was a report of her reading while on the clock. She cultivated this ability to help customers find the books they were looking for.

So, I'm going to keep hunting until the end of the month then we will likely move to Poughkeepsie-ish and grab what work we can. Hopefully they'll still need service technicians down there then.

Southwest.com (Airline) gets today's Special Job Posting Mention. Their posting for a Systems Engineer runs about 150 lines. It was more bewildering on dice.com because they removed ALL of the indenting and the heirarchy become a flat list of 150 duties and requirements. I'm just glad that one of the requirements isn't 'Terse communicator".

Engrish, it's good for the writers and OK for you:

"You want to know skills of job hunting , think federal government computer programming jobs , why not think resumes jobs careers unlimited"

I won't link because they are already rated too high in google. And I believe my intro is from Demolition Man, something like "Eat recycled food. It's good for the environment and OKAY for you!"

I'm beginning to think that the mighty Google has fallen. I have been unable to get clean results on anything lately. Every search I do returns a hundred sites that want me to look at how little content they have.

Similiarly, I can't get decent results out of job search engines. I'm thinking about writing some software to read the job search sites and run my own searches on the data.

Sorry dear family of mine. That dictionary for Palm Pilots wasn't on my Links page. It's called A-Lex and is available for download on PalmSpot.com (A-Lex)

Phone bill: 24.48 for verizon, 13.55 for taxes. grrrrrr.

Jenny and I visited Fort Ticonderoga yesterday while 600 odd Revolutionary War re-enactors where camping and having a shootout. It was very strange for us as SCAdians. Women's garb is not very different then that worn in the time covered by the SCA (500-1500CE) so it was a slightly familiar environment. The men's garb is drastically different. We would alternate between being put at ease and being confused. Several times during the day I found myself giving small bows of greeting. I caught myself before saying "Good day my lord" though.

Towards the end of the day, Jenny and I found the antique cannons and had a ball photographing them and trying to decipher coats of arms and the banners under them. I got a lot of pictures.

We took route 9 home instead of the highway. It was a very pleasant drive which wandered through a hot rod feastival in Lake George (sorry no pics there).

Tom's hints and tips for employeers posting job ads:

• Start the ad with the requirements. Save the excellence of your company until the end. The first thing I care about is whether I have any chance at all. Start with the degree and years of experience required. Move right on to keywords.
• Don't over require. "3 years of experience driving yellow, Thomas brand buses in Bostonshire, stopping often to pick-up or discharge still growing persons." is too specific. "3 years of experience driving a bus. Experience with children, the Bostonshire area and Thomas brand buses prefered." would work as well.
• Avoid posting jobs for local candidates on nation-wide job boards.
• Check that your job posting is readable. Does it have spaces between paragraphs or sections? Did your wonderful layout survive posting on each website?

-- Happy September and birthdays to my family!

-- My Pennsic pictures are the third entry that google returns on a search for "Pennsic 2003". It's wierd to run a webserver. Reading my log, I'd like to send Hellos to the many someones who have visited me:
in the Pscyhology department of Pittsburg U,
at U. Michigan,
using level3.net on dialup,
a friend of Sonny and Jaime's at the NYS Office of Mental Health,
on a cable modem through blueyonder.co.UK (Yes, the United Kingdom),
at oracle.com,
at lilly.com,
in Amherst, NY using Adelphia.net,
in the Office of the Chief Information Officer at USDA.gov,
on a Mac through cox.net,
on AOL (AOL actually does a good job of hiding who you are in my logs),
on btopenworld.com,
who searched google for "nancy kevin" (Jenny's dad and stepmom),
on DSL from inet.fi (Finland?),
and search engines: google.com, wanadoo.fr (France), and xo.net (China?)
and my mom, Jeff, Joe, and Sonny from work and home,
and everyone that Sonny and Jaime know :) (Jaime actually collected most of the pictures of his wedding onto his site.)
Oh, and Hi to me. I'm the most frequent visitor to my webserver. :D