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I’m not a big reality show guy, although I watched the first couple seasons of Tough Enough. However, my TiVo enables all kinds of degenerate behavior, including reality TV addiction, so I figured I’d watch a couple of episodes of The Apprentice. The basic setup is simple; Donald Trump brings in 8 men and 8 women to compete for a job with him. They split up into two teams, men versus women, and every week they have a different competition. At the end of each show, Trump fires someone from the losing team. ...

For your contemplation, I offer a letter from a soldier in Iraq (original).

Say what you will about Dean’s mythical temper (Real Video, will likely go away soonish), but I can’t see how he was out of line here. You get up at a Democrat’s stump speech, you call the candidate pompous and mean-mouthed, and then you try to interrupt him when he responds to you — perhaps just maybe you ought to expect to be told to sit down.

L’il Bolt’s training is coming along nicely, but I fear he lacks the fire necessary to — Oh, sorry, wrong kind of sidekick. I’m still pretty happy with this Sidekick, with some caveats. The software bugs which prevent it from ringing when Keyguard is enabled are annoying. The battery life is short enough so that I have to recharge it every night without fail. Also, my thumb wheel broke and I had to get the entire unit replaced. All in all, I’d say it’s about 85% of the way there and I still recommend it for people like me who don’t mind being early adopters. Danger is currently claiming that a software update to address known bugs will show up sometime in March, but that’s not a firm date.

For our pleasantly palindromic mashup number 22, we’ll keep on plumbing the depths (or heights) of the 80s with The Lost Boys, the second best vampire movie of 1987. (The best one will no doubt turn up in this meme at a later date.) The setup is nice and simple; a normal family moves someplace and finds an evil both ancient and tempting. There’s not a lot of vampiric angst, although there’s a smidgen of romantic angst, but really it’s an action flick with fangs. Trivia du jour: that railway trestle is something like six feet or so above the earth. Camera angles can work marvels. On with the mashup.

Coming this fall: TiVo to computer functionality (original). It’s not what I’d like, since you don’t get full functionality — it’s some encrypted video format. Mind you, DRM is generally broken… but in any case, it’s more than we had before. I would very much like to be able to easily copy programs from my TiVo to a DVD. Cory Doctorow, bless him, is up in arms (original). However, I think his analogies suck. While TiVo is a disruptive technology business, it is not much like steam engines. It’s a different delivery mechanism rather than a new media form. ...

Pete Rose is still gambling. What kind of idiot would let him back into baseball now?

As per Phil Ringnalda’s advice — I’m experimenting with rebuilding individual archives when an entry gets a TrackBack ping. If you have trouble pinging me, please let me know about it. Also, you might try setting a longer value for PingTimeout in your mt.cfg file.

The IMF, noted tool of the socialist movement, notes that the US is looking like it might take down the world’s economy. That’s warming news.

Since it’s the 20th anniversary: 128K Mac (original; later upgraded to 512K Fat Mac) Mac SE/20 Mac SE/30 Performa 630 Performa 6400 (later ran linux on this) G3/450 (currently next to me running OpenBSD) G4/733 iBook tangerine clamshell iBook SE Firewire Powerbook 12” G4/1 GHz Loved ‘em all.