A user on Reddit.com posted a personal story about how his life is out of order and how depressed he feels and how he believes something is wrong with him. It is a long but decent read. I thought a reply to this post was very well worded. While targeted towards this particular user, I feel that it is good advice for anyone feeling down. Here it is.

Kind of depressing, but a lot of folks have been down this path. I think most get out of it, but end up miserable for years. I don’t know your philosophy on life, or if you even have one but I can tell you how to move the ball forward just a bit. You should devote tomorrow to cleaning your apartment. Not picking it up and moving the garbage around clean it. Stop at nothing until it is perfectly spotless. When you have finished that task start to organize your life on paper. Work at it. Do it better than you have ever done anything. I am much older than you and I’ll tell you one lesson I’ve learned …

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Some of you may have noticed some photos of our wedding on Juice, The Dropbox.  I put them up there because I figured you guys may want to snag them, which I have full rights to do under my contract with the photographer.  Part of our deal was that we would receive a DVD with all of our pictures, in high resolution, and we could do with them as we please as long as we weren’t selling them.

So today, Jackie and I decided we were finally going to fill some frames we got as wedding gifts with said photos.  We had them quickly printed at Walgreens, and when we arrived to pick them up we were greeted by a smiling Walgreens employee who promptly asked if we had a waiver from the photographer to print these photos.

Huh?

After asking a couple questions, it became clear that we had to drive all the way home, dig up our photographer’s contract and drive back to Walgreens.  When we got back, we were helped by the Assistant Manager.  I asked him a few questions:

When did this policy start?

We’ve always had it.

How do you know they are professional photos?

We can tell by looking at them.

What happens when my friends and family try to print these photos?

You’ll have to give them a copy of the release.

This seems kind of ridiculous.

Well, it’s the law.  We just want to sell photos, but we have to protect the photographers who make them because that’s their livelihood.

I just had to nod.

It is fairly obvious that this is pure legal bullshit on the part of Walgreens.  I mean, had I actually been printing something without permission, how easy would it be for me to get around it?  First of all, I could have just said that I took those photos.  They would have no way to prove otherwise.

Secondly, what’s stopping me from typing the following release letter?

To Whom It May Concern:

I hereby authorize Brian Lindenau to print any of my photos.

Sincerely,

Theodore Roosevelt

I mean, they don’t even know who took the photograph.

This seems like this is an issue that could be easily handled by a simple checkbox, similar to what Facebook asks you: “I certify that I have the right to distribute this picture and that it does not violate the Terms of Use.”

It might save everyone some time and headache, and would be equally toothless.

For now, I guess I’ll just print my photos at a place that doesn’t place arbitrary legal barriers in front of me.

I know that I harp on this a lot, but it’s something that I think people need to be reminded of, because it’s one of those things that doesn’t get a lot of press. So here goes:

The bailout worked.  The stress tests worked.  Tim Geithner did a good job.

There’s a good article in The New Yorker this week making this case, and it also does a good job of highlighting how politically repugnant this entire process was:

In the history of product launches, the rollout of the Obama Administration’s plan to stabilize the financial system was in the category of “Ishtar,” smokeless cigarettes, and New Coke.

The bottom line, though, is that these policies were a smashing success.  Banks are more capitalized than they’ve been in over 70 years, GDP is growing, and at the end of the day, the federal government will be out only 117 billion dollars, most of which didn’t even go to Wall Street (*cough* GM *cough*).

I could end up quoting this article all day, so you should just go read it, but I particularly liked the closing line from Geithner himself:

“Why do policymakers screw up financial crises?” he said before I left his office. “They screw up financial crises because the politics are horrible, and that deters action. They are slow and late and tentative and weak because they are scared to death of the politics. But sometimes a policymaker has to say, I’ll take pain now against pain later.”

There’s at least one adult in Washington, and his name is Timothy Franz Geithner.

This beautiful Friday morning yielded some nice relaxing times. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to eat till about 5 PM, but when we did, it was glorious. I personally had a delicious cajun tortellini with cheese, shrimp, and scallions. Kyle had an awesome looking Salmon club sandwich that my cat (PEANUT ONE LOVE) would have loved. Our waitress wanted Adam’s junk real bad.

Joey had a slushy (sp?) that was filled with the nectar of the gods, aka two shots of 190 proof grain alcohol. We then all took naps, and played some serious Ninja Gaiden. We’re on our way to the night scene by the river, hopefully in for another night of insanity.

BTW NOTES:
- Colin’s doing ok. He got his knee wound (it’s nothing to worry about) all disinfected.

- Ninja Gaiden for the NES is fucking hard.

- Yoosy. MmmHmm.

and receives gives (thanks, Joey!) a botched piggy-back ride from to Adam:

Watch this.

It’s from the animated film Allegro Non Troppo by Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto.

One could call Allegro a parody of Disney’s Fantasia at first glance, but I see it more as another attempt at doing what Fantasia attempted to do; create beautiful animated works to go along with classical pieces of music.

This section from Allegro is based off the piece Valse Triste (Sad Waltz) from the play Kuolema.

(Just like Fantasia, there are live-action interludes, but I’d argue that Allegro’s interludes are more comedic on purpose, as it seeks to poke fun at Fantasia).

OFFICIAL TIM AND ERIC AWESOME SHOW, GREAT JOB! SEASON CINCO PROMO! “CINCO” from Tim and Eric on Vimeo.

AT&T has obviously been wounded by Verizon’s “Map” commercials.  They’ve been firing back with some speed claims that I’m sure most people didn’t take seriously.

But now there’s some evidence to back up the claim.  PCWorld has released it’s second round of speed test data taken between December 2009 and January 2010 in 13 cities, and the title of the story sums it up: “AT&T Roars Back in PCWorld’s Second 3G Wireless Performance Test.”

They also tested network/smartphone pairs, and AT&T/iPhone was the best performer.  PCWorld had this to say about the Verizon/Droid pair:

Our smartphone-based tests revealed some significant performance limitations of the Verizon network when we connected to it with a Motorola Droid. [...]

Overall, the Droid delivered an average upload speed of just 116 kbps, the lowest average of any carrier/phone combo in our smartphone tests. And in numerous tests using the Droid, we recorded upload speeds of less than 75 kbps–painfully slow if you’re trying to send data of any size up through the network.

We also had trouble establishing a reliable connection between the Verizon network and the Droid during our tests. Verizon delivered an uninterrupted signal at reasonable speed in only 76 percent of our tests–far below the success rates of the 90+ percent that the other three carriers achieved.

Download speeds to the Droid, on the other hand, were quite good, at an average of 1075 kbps; that’s not far from the upper end of the speed range that Verizon promised its customers, and ranks as the second-highest average download speed in our smartphone-based tests–behind only AT&T.

Now I may be an Apple fanboy, but I am definitely not an AT&T fanboy.  Their regular phone service has always been lackluster for me (just try calling me in my kitchen; I dare you), but this bit of news is kind of refreshing to see.

In a previous rant after the Massachusetts special election, I ranted about Scott Brown and how any vote for a Republican at this point is a vote for partisanship and evil etc. etc. To be vein and quote myself:

He is a senator, and is going to disappear to Washington and represent his constituents by voting with his party on every issue.

I have been anxiously awaiting his term so that I could flaunt how right I was. Well, I am here to say that, at least so far in this one instance, Scott Brown has acted in a respectable way by voting with what he feels is right and not just with his party. Nate Silver covers this well in his post, where he defends Brown as an “authentically moderate Republican.”

I still will likely not support Brown on several issues of policy. I am very happy, however, to see someone vote not with their party but with what they feel is right for their state and, hopefully, the country. With the majority of Republicans clearly “Not Embarrassed”, as the Rachel Maddow title says, it is refreshing to see a senator do their job, even if they are not in my party.

This just blew my mind:

I love curling.

No, I’m not joking.  I genuinely love curling.  I think it’s awesome.  But for some reason, whenever I try to tell people how awesome curling is they smile at me waiting for me to say that I’m kidding.

What is it that is so hard for people to believe?

My money’s on the brooms:

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From here:

Google is planning to launch an experiment that we hope will make Internet access better and faster for everyone. We plan to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. Our networks will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We’ll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

From now until March 26th, we’re asking interested municipalities to provide us with information about their communities through a Request for information (RFI), which we’ll use to determine where to build our network.

You know what would make for a perfect test community?

Hung up on after: 1:06:13

I called Western Digital to request an RMA for a device i got that was defective when I opened it. Their robotic service directed me quickly to a representative who is to help me get my RMA supposedly.

We have not yet even addressed what is wrong with the device. He asked for my name and the serial number on the device. After I gave him my serial number, he told me that he had to put me on hold. It has been about 50 minutes since he put me on hold so I thought I would live blog the action. I wonder how long it is going to take after he comes back and I actually tell him what is wrong with the device. Also, with the information I gave him, what in the world could take him so long? All he should need to do is look up my device, right? I think he went to lunch.

12:49 PM (54:40 call time) – Still on hold.

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I haven’t posted in quite some time about the small garden I planted about a two months ago, so I thought I’d throw up an update.

Things are going pretty well.  My first set of lettuce looks pretty mature, and I’m thinking about harvesting quite a bit of it for some salads tomorrow.  Ditto with the spinach.  I’m not quite sure what to do with the chard, since there’s not really enough to cook, but maybe I’ll throw some into the salad and see how that tastes.

I’ve also started a couple plants for spring/summer inside.  I have a basil plant and a jalapeno plant that are starting very nicely.

Some things I’ve learned:

• I should have planted a whole square at once.  When you’re thinking about how much you’ll have at harvest time, 4 lettuce plants sounds like a lot but it’s really not that much.
• Leafy plants need some extra nitrogen along the way.  I noticed that some of my growth was going a little slow.  Jackie got me a great gardening book for my birthday, and it recommended fish emulsion, which is an organic fertilizer.  My growth has picked up significantly after applying some.
• Loose-leaf lettuce sounds nice, but will never yield as much as head-type lettuce.  I think I will go for some romaine varieties next season.

My compost is also moving along pretty nicely.  The bin is about 2/3 full at this point, and I can actually feel a little bit of heat emanating from the bin when I turn it.  I think sometime around mid-summer I’ll have a full bin of rich black gold.

I’m still pretty excited about my crazy ambition for the summer: corn.  Will it be my bane, or my sweet victory?

We’ll see.

I still hate the Oscars, but fuck yeah.