"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

well, i figured it would happen, just not this soon. over the weekend my car was broken into and my stereo was jacked.

it would have been truly classic to see a video of my reaction as i opened my door and climbed in to see the face of my dashboard flapping open in front of me. I remember thinking ... "hmm, that wasn't like that when i left." Then about 3 seconds later i noticed the stiff breeze that seemed to be coming from inside of my car and looked over my shoulder to see a nice back seat full of glass. At that point it clicked and the whole suprise element really set in ... "wow, i've been fucking robbed."

The next step was to survey the situation and try and remember if i had left anything valuable in my car, most notably my cds ... *fear*. Luckily I had been smart enough to keep those with me at all times and never leave them in the car, especially over a weekend, so my cd case was safe. I almost never leave anything of value in my car, but I kept looking around just in case. I remember a sudden fear when I realized the glove compartment had been opened and emptied. I immediately thought that for some reason the person had grabbed my car insurance and registration info, but again I was lucky and the glove compartment had simply been emptied onto the floor. As I finished assesing the damage I was suprised to find that the person had in fact left everything in the car except for the stereo ... they didn't even take the cds sitting in the visor above my car.

At the end of it all I just ended up with a broken window and stolen stereo, which in truth I had thought about replacing a few times over the last year anyways. Above all it was more of a rude awakening about the realities of living in a big city. Once I replace my stereo I am sure i'll be *much* better about taking the face plate with me when I go.

Now the question is what new car stereo should I get? :)

This item at slashdot peaked my interest. It says "[The UK] leads the world in TV piracy, accounting for 38.4% of the world's TV downloads, with Australia coming in second at 15.6% and the US in third at a pitiful 7.3%"

Here's some other stats:
UK population - 59 million
Australia population - 20 million
US population - 295 million
California - 35 million

What is interesting to me is that the UK and Australia, which have small populations when compared to the rest of the world, are the biggest pirates. Why? Why aren't americans higher on the list? Is it because the average american really does respect copyright laws? or because the average american doesn't have the technical skills to find, download, and watch this stuff?

I imagine that all the english speaking countries are at the top because most of the entertainment industry is english based, so there is a bigger market for it. A guess as to why the US isn't at the top could be because americans have easy access to all the latest entertainment in legitimate form, while the UK and Australia may have to wait 6 months to a year before getting the latest season of certain shows. Maybe they are just impatient?

You do have to admit that it is strange that over half of the tv piracy in the world is dominated by a population less than a third the size of the US. And where is China? we know those guys like to pirate right?

The title makes it sound like a really geeky blog, but Life Hacker is actually the total opposite. Life Hacker is an excellent blog that gives solid and very usable tech advice targeted toward people who don't necessarily sit in front of computers all day. Most of the posts are simple and easy to understand for the non-geeky, and they really do offer some great tips.

Originally uploaded by geezer87.

just uploaded a new batch of stuff from my past few classes of figure drawing. check 'em out.

it's fun filled friday isn't it! go check out postsecret

I probably shouldn't pass this along because it's one of those, "Beware! this will cause time to evaporte." Del.icio.us has a feature called the inbox which I believe is reasonably new because I don't remember seeing it when i first signed up. Anyways, it lets you subscribe to feeds of links essentially providing an aggregated inbox of links for you to browse. This is insanely valuable for discovering blogs when you combine it with firefox's live bookmarks feature.

here's what you do ...
Go to the del.icio.us homepage and click the "blog" filter/tag link on the right. That will show the most recent XXX links posted with the tag "blog". Then at the top under the title you'll see the link "subscribe" ... click it and you are now subscribed to the "blog" tag. Now go back to your del.icio.us page and click the link in the upper right hand navbar that says "inbox". This is your aggregated view of all your del.icio.us subscriptions. Now just click the little orange button in the very bottom right hand corner of your firefox browser and "subscribe to rss". Choose wherever you want to file this in your bookmarks and you're done.

The live bookmark will update periodically by grabbing the latest batch of links from your del.icio.us inbox and make them available right in your browser. You now have the latest blogs posted on del.icio.us delivered directly into your browser!

Repeat with any user/tag combinations you like to get a great variety of links in your inbox.

Note that if you don't want to flood your inbox with too many links, but you still want to have access to them you can always just create a live bookmark from pretty much any page on del.icio.us rather than subscribing. i.e. go to del.icio.us/blog and create a live bookmark.

Is it me or is blogging becoming too much fun these days =)