Jesse Ventura is pretty out there these days, even more so than he used to be. I certainly never voted for him, and I find his whole conspiracy-theory stuff pretty off-putting. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I am hard-pressed to find much to disagree with in regards to his latest comments:

• Norm Coleman is a “hypocrite” who should give it up? Check.
• Not embarrassed about the recount procedure? Check.
• Waterboarding is torture? Check.
• Dick Cheney is a coward? Check.
• George W. Bush the worst president of my lifetime? Check. Even Jimmy Carter had the Camp David accords.
• Normalize relations with Cuba? Check.

The only thing I’m not sure about is his wish to be ambassador to Cuba. But maybe it would work out: he and the Castros could talk about all the U.S. government conspiracies they want.

As a tech person, I use a lot of software utilities. Some of them are esoteric programs that do one thing and few people would care about, but others are so great and generally useful I think everybody should have them. Through the magic of this blog, now I can share my experiences and suggestions. I’ll write about the utilities I find most useful, and to start out, here’s a utility I use nearly every day that you should be using too if you value security: Password Safe.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I went to see the new Star Trek. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s about as good a series reboot as you can hope for. The casting was spot-on and the story was decent. I thought it started off a lot stronger than it finished, and the plot did strain credulity at times, but that didn’t make a huge difference. Star Trek has never been hard sci-fi, it’s always been character-driven, and this story certainly was. Hopefully this means a rebirth of the franchise and more entertainment in the future.

One of the greatest benefits in moving from a compact digital point-and-shoot camera to a DSLR is the increase in flexibility you have over depth of field. Depth of field, or DOF, is a measure of how much of a scene is in focus in an image. Sometimes, you want as much of the scene to be in focus as possible, but there are many times when you want to direct the viewer’s attention to the subject, and leave the background as a nice, non-distracting blur. DSLRs give you far more ability to control DOF than a compact point-and-shoot.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official: I and Julia are moving to a new place in NE Minneapolis in July. It’s the top floor of a duplex, new kitchen, pretty cool. I’ll finally be getting back to Minneapolis after wandering in the wilderness of Saint Paul for a bit.

Of course, I’ll post pictures at some future date.

Windows 7 Release Candidate came out this week. Although I haven’t yet tried it out, I did try out the Windows 7 beta a while back (both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions). It looks like a pretty decent OS, but when the bar you are trying to leap over is Vista, that’s not saying much

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m having a hard time deciding if this is satire. Sadly, I don’t think it is.

I was reading the David Brooks column today (don’t judge me too harshly), and it got me thinking. Don’t get me wrong: David Brooks is usually off in never-never land as far as I am concerned, and he had a couple of roll-your-eyes doozies today, such as starting right off the bat with “Republicans generally like Westerns. They generally admire John Wayne-style heroes who are rugged, individualistic and brave.” and then segueing to “Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order.” Right. Individualism and freedom indeed; tell the former to all of those anti-war protesters circa 2002 and the latter to all those people, Jane Harman included, who have had their phone calls or other private correspondence surveilled in the name of national security.

But even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then, and the gem to be taken from this column is this: “They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Minnesota Alcohol and Gambling Enforcement Division sent letters to 11 ISPs in the state asking them to block access to 200 online gambling website, citing a federal wire transfer law of dubious applicability to the Internet and the state’s ability to force ISPs to take this action. This is a terrible idea in so many ways it’s hard to count.

First, a bit of disclosure: I like playing poker. I’ve played poker both in real live ring games and online. I take issue with online poker being lumped in with other forms of “gambling”. Gambling at a casino means making a bet against the house, which has an edge that varies from the very small to the outrageously huge. There is little, if any, skill involved, and over the long run you are going to lose your money. Poker, on the other hand, does not pit a person against the house and its daunting advantage. Instead, it pits player against player, and the money you win comes directly from other people when you outmaneuver them. It is certainly possible to make a living by playing poker; skill is all that counts, the cards you get evening out for everybody in the long run. Online or in real life, the provider of the poker arena (the online software or the chips, dealer, table, cards, etc. in real life) just get a slice of the action for providing the service.

So if there’s any such thing as a truly “victimless crime”, online poker, where participants willingly win and lose their own money amongst themselves, has to be it. Wasting resources going after this activity seems like a case of misplaced priorities. However, that’s hardly the sole reason this is a bad move. More frightening is the state attempting to get ISPs to block whatever they believe to be “objectionable content” without demonstrating a clear public need for such a block. This proposal came out of the blue with no public input; surely a measure as drastic as blocking access to a large category of websites deserves some debate among the people.

Barney Frank, the Democrat from Massachusetts is proposing that the ban on online gambling be modified to undo the draconian change that was passed into law in 2006 almost completely under the radar (under a Republican Congress, to boot); I think such a change is long overdue. Should online gambling be regulated? Absolutely. But outright bans and witch hunts don’t accomplish much.

I’ve been taking pictures for much of my life. When I was a kid, I got a cheap 110 film camera for Christmas. Like many 110 cameras, it was little more than a plastic toy, but it was something my brother and I put to good use for many years. When I was older, I got a point-and-shoot Nikon 35mm camera, which I also enjoyed. But it wasn’t until I took an introductory photography course in college that I really got into it. I used a Pentax 35mm SLR and shot black-and-white film, doing all of the developing and enlarging the old-fashioned way. It was the very first class I ever took in college (8 AM Monday morning!) and it became my favorite, combining technical know-how with artistic sensibilities.

Read the rest of this entry »