CV of Justin Lang

This is truly a sad sad day in the iPhone history.  MSNBC has just published a new release from Best Buy.  Best Buy will be the first US national retailer to sell the iPhone.  Sure this is great for apple, another re seller of the products can only mean bigger profits!

But it is best buy!  THEY SUCK at everything.  It’s great that they have an mini apple shop in almost all best buys.  But find mea sales rep that knows what they are talking about!  They only good thing that comes of this is that I can buy apple products in best buy and use my best buy card and not have to pay anything for two years with no interest!

UPDATE: I beat almost ALL the Mac Blogs about this… except Apple Insider, they got it at 7am :(

Saw this over on twitter as I follow Barack Obama over there.  You can sign up to be the first to know who Obama picks for his running mate/Vice President.  You can get it either email or text message.  I signed up for text message as I want to know RIGHT AWAY!!!

Appareently he’ll announce it before the Covention.  Which is probably a smart move.  If he announces at the convention, it is rumored that McCain will announce that friday night or early saturday to take away some steam from Obama.  So announing sooner might push McCain to announce just as soon.

Smart Move Obama!

Again from the guys over at engadget, another neat gadget! This time it is the Freedom Stick. You can read engadgets article here.

With the summer Olympics going on over in china right now, anyone and everyone who tries to access some websites will have troubles due to the fact that china has a national firewall in place restricting access to those websites.  Don’t ask me which ones, I have no idea!

So the Chaos Computer Club came up with the Freedom Stick.  Basically it is a jump drive with software and access to The Onion Router network or TOR.  The freedom stick is great for anonymous surfing and hides your identity.  While you can certainly download the TOR software over at the TOR project page, the Freedom Stick has it all right there for you and you can use it at internet cafes and so forth.

Another option you have is to setup a proxy server here in the states and access that server in china thus allowing you to go to any site you wich.  That is what the guy who bought my OLD G3 Blue tower Mac is using it for!

The guys over at engadget had a neat article about biodegradable memory sticks from Hoshino. You can check out engadgets post here.

What I find interesting about this memory stick is that is is made out of polylactide which is technically biodegradable plastic.  But to make is re usable or “eliminate” it you have to blast it with heat for ten days and a specialized facility.

Um…… does that sound like it take a shit load more to “dispose” of it then it does to repurpose it or do something else with it instead of tossing it into a dumpster???  Think about all the energy it will take over thsoe ten days to produce the heat required to dispose of it!!

While driving around today, I heard some interesting news on WTOP about how there are debates about shortening the national school week to only 4 days. You can read the article here.

Basically there are debates about reducing the national school week to 4 days due to rising engery cost.  In addition to shortening the week, they are talking about cutting extracuriculative activities such as sports and groups.

I have to say, this is a BAD BAD BAD idea.  First of all our children are not getting the best education due to many things and now we want to cut their education time???  Sure it may only be 40 days, but do the math, that is 320 hours that we our taking away from them to learn something new!! Don’t we think we should INCREASE there days or even extend the school day further?

Now on to my favorite part, they are thinking of cutting extra activites… First on the chopping block I’m sure are the arts!  Then all the other activies such as chem club and mathletics.  Hell, while we’re at it, cut student leaderships, that why when the kids grow up, they can run for congress and other elected offices and not know what they are doing and totally fuck up our medicade and social security.  Do you see where I am going with this??  But of course the last thing to go will be football.  We’ll need footballers to pay WAY TO MUCH money and then have it easy for the rest of thier life while not knowing how to add.  Sounds like a great society we are bringing up.  Is america jr still accepting immigrants?

So it happened… I took the plunge and picked up my new Mac Pro and 23″ Cinema Display from the Clarendon Apple Store on Saturday!  Let me tell you, this thing is beautiful and SOOOO powerful. It fits right into my work space at home.  I got the basic model with 2xduo core 2.8 and 2 gigs of ram with a 320gig hard drive and only one cd rom.  All of this can of course be upgraded later which is why I was so attracked to the Mac Pro.  I am still working on getting everything transfered over, but the main thing is done, my iTunes songs and movies!!!  Now I just have to finish loading my programs and Renee’s stuff.

Picking up the Mac Pro on Saturday was quite the adventure as it was the second day since the release of the 2nd iPhone.  There was still a line out the door for the iPhone and another smaller line for customer looking at getting other things!  After everything was said and done, I walked out with a 5% business discount on everything, a businesss account, a personal shopper at the apple store and $200 dollars worth of free stuff.  How can you go wrong with that?

What is this? Starbucks is going to be getting out of the music business????  No longer are they going to be selling Cd’s or iTunes gift cards at any of their retail locations.  It turns out they are actually losing money trying to compete with digital music distributors such as iTunes and other online music outlets.  What did they expect???  Awhile ago, I thought that they were going to quite doing things like selling sandwiches and other crap like that so they can get back to their roots, selling coffee.  They need to focus on the coffee. maybe resreaching ways to make their $4 drinks CHEAPER!!!!

As I was driving into work this morning, I heard on WTOP that Virginia is going to make a stiffer penalty for underage kids that have a blood alcohol level of .02 or higher to lose their drivers license for one year automatically.  .02 BAL is about the equivalent of 1 drink.  One DRINK!  I can see the argument on either side, .02 is nothing. But why not any traces of alcohol and make it illigeal.  First of all, underage drinking is illegal on a national level.  so with a BAL of .02, the kid has had something with alchol in it, thus he is “drunk” or has had a drink.  So why not make it .01 or higher?

The other side could be that the kid took something with alcohol in it that is leagal, such as medican or something along those lines.  No that one is a tough one that I am not going to even TOUCH!  Just know it out there.

Anyways, my flip side of the story is that I was reading an article out of time magazine this morning waiting for the coffee to start up about Steve Carell and 10 questions people asked him.  Funny stuff!  Well I finished that and flipped the page and read another article with the headline, “Society: Drinking Do it With Your Kids, They won’t get tipsy if they toast with the folks”.  What kind of message is that sending?  Now Jimmy, you can’t drink on your own or with your friends or drink after that, but it ok to drink with mommy and daddy because we can monitor your alcohol.  What kind of Bullshit is that?  I remeber my parents having parties at home and of course we were not allowed to have drinks.  But we still snuck them when they weren’t around.  In the mean time my parents were working on forgetting their own names.  Now I am not saying I have bad parents, but were checking every now and then to see wht we were doing.  When they weren’t looking, that is when we struck!

So what is my point?  We have one side of the society saying kids should not be drinking and driving.  Then the other saying, it is ok for the kids to drink, but only with their parents.  Shouldn’t we be saying as a whole that kids should not be drinking period?  If we all look at the federal law, it says it pretty clearly, you must be 21 years of age to legally drink.  I am not saying that we can control underage drinking easily.  Hell, just look at me, it wasn’t to difficult in high school or my first two years at college, but I did drink before I was 21.  I just don’t think we should be putting it out there glorifying or saying it is ok to help your children drink, they will find other means of percuring the good stuff.