Category: Uncategorized

NPR’s All Things Considered: Dead Air Online. I heard this piece the other day on NPR. It seems that webcasting radio stations are having a very difficult way to go, not only from record companies (greedy bastards) but distribution companies as well. According to a new contract between advertisers, ad agencies, and AFTRA (The American Federation of Radio Artists) advertisers own artists an additional fee if their content is streamed across the internet. Rather than loose the revenue, hundreds of radio stations simply canned their webcasts. paxtonland radio, however will continue to bring you commercial free quality programming for nothing, to hell with all of them.

CNN.com – George W. Bush dead- August 31, 2001 No, not really… but you can fake your own celebrity death too if you check out… “Fake Someone’s Death” By B3ta.

Mom pimps 13 year old daugher. Teen claims they used money to buy, smoke crack cocaine… Think your parent suck? ?It?s hard to understand how this could happen,? Dobson (cop in the scene) said. ?People will do anything for drugs and this just proves it.?

Speaking of asians, ALL LOOK SAME beta. Test your asian aptitude.

Testicle ripper offer update: “I don’t want her prosecuted.” The case of the woman who ripped her husbands balls off ends peacefully. Evidently he won’t allow charges to be pressed upon her. He is saying that he was drunk, he attacked her first, and he probably deserved what he got. I do admire the guy for standing by his wife, right or wrong, but lemme tell you… I wouldn’t be mowing the lawn, or doing dishes for the rest of my life.

Jackie Chan has been spotted on the “Got Milk” billboard ads dotting the country. I found this more than amusing since 90% of all asian people (particularly Chinese) are lactose intolerant. I guess you could probably safely change that slogan, in his case, to “Got the shits?“

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is a spectacular place to look around. I spent too much time in there yesterday. This is another “what the internet was supposed to do” site for your bookmarks.

Samsung has a DVD/VHS combo machine for $299.00 that may help some make their mind up about upgrading their ancient VCR, or switching to DVD, or both. This item could be as curious in 20 years as the recordable 8 track players that are floating around here and there. Nah, nothing could be that curious.

Webattack.com has posted a walk through demoonstration of Internet Explorer 6.0 and it’s features. Thanks to Tim Thompson for finding this for me.

Woman pulls off man’s scrotum, on his birthday no less. In a spat, she yanked off his nuggets. Terriffic. Don’t forget the last section of the article that cites no less that 5 incidents in the last ten years involving male genital injury.

stileproject.com has posted a video of a cat being killed, prepped and eaten on his site. No one knows the nature of the vid, no one seems to care really. The video could be of Korean origin but, I don’t think so. Regardless, the controversy rages about it. Some find if beyond tasteless, others think that it’s just a matter of course and it is no worse that human, or other animal scenes of death. Anyone raised on a farm or, watched Roger & Me, or hunted will recognize the method use to despose, clean, and prepare the poor beast for consumption. Watch with caution.

Fusinski.com XP! Looks like something is stirring over at Rich’s site… Remember, you read it here first.

Internet Explorer 6.0 is apparently done and ready for download.

Floridian: Fatherhood, a page at a time Over 8,000 entries, 7,000 pages. This is a fathers love in action.

Growing Audience Is Turning to Established News Media Online (login required, use mine! user:dean_paxton password:paxton) “National sites will get more and more of a share of the news audience and the smaller sites will get less and less,” predicted Vin Crosbie, president of the consulting firm Digital Deliverance.” (Digital Deliverance? WTF? Does that mean? When I think of Deliverance I think of terrifyingly inbred rednecks prone to sodomizing tourists.)

Well, I’m sorry to disagree with the uber marketing techohillbillys at the New York Times and “Digital Deliverance.” If internet news is only going to consist of MSNBC, Slate, Reuters, AOL and whatever else. I better shut down paxtonland now. All these guys are trying to apply old advertising demographics to market share on the internet. For gods sake, get over it.

“The smaller the media outlet online, the more likely it will be pared down to its core competence, which is local news,” Mr. Crosbie said.” Thank you Mr. Obvious… that pearl of wisdom I can carry to my grave. National conglomo syndicates cannot get local news right. More, they cannot figure out how to squeeze the local markets for more cash without the FCC getting pissed.

“New-media dynamics do have something to do with the success of old media online. The ability to turn on a fire hose full of online subscribers and point it in the direction of a particular site helps.” Okay that tears it, I’m not fodder for your crap and neither are most of the readers on the internet. Please get off of your old/new media mantra once and for all. The old rules only apply as long as there are technophobic baby boomers like these still alive.

“None of the other big national news sites have adopted The Journal’s paid-subscription model. But the daily Cedar Rapids, Iowa, newspaper, The Gazette (daily circulation 66,000), owned by Gazette Communications, plans this fall to begin charging some users of Gazetteonline.com, whose most popular offerings outside the political season are coverage of University of Iowa sports, local news and obituaries.” Ummmm, no they won’t you’ll tank miserably. Why on earth will people subscribe to what they can get for free at 100,000 other sites. Dumb. More boomer financial ethics, the same mentality that sunk the internet earlier this year.

“Terry Bergen, The Gazette’s director of marketing and Internet services, said that Web users who wanted more than a headline service would pay $8 a month or $60 a year…” Terry, get ready for the unemployment line… Buddy get comfortable with the online jobs listings (if they don’t go to a pay model too). I wouldn’t pay $8.00 a month for porn much less pork belly reports from Devil’s Asshole Iowa. HAVE YOU NOT LEARNED ANYTHING FROM THE LAST SIX MONTHS!!! Guess not. They’d better learn how to subsist on advert revenues as they always have, or else. Go.com, Excite.com, and half of the mega news portals are tanking in case you didn’t notice. No amount of user subscriptions is going to help you please your shareholders. Get out of the business… spare us all the misery of a second round of dotcom failures, please.

What’s My Pirate Name? is cute. Mine came out:

Your pirate name is: Captain Sam Read

Even though there’s no legal rank on a pirate ship, everyone recognizes you’re the one in charge. Even through many pirates have a reputation for not being the brightest souls on earth, you defy the sterotypes. You’ve got taste and education. Arr!

TIME.com – L.A.’s Gangs Are Back “100,000 gang members in jail in California, and they are getting out at a rate of about 3,000 a month, according to the state’s department of corrections. This year alone will see more than 30,000 veteran gang members back on the streets. Social workers call them “spoons” ? people who get out of jail and stir things up”

Thanks blogger, it only took six hours for the preceeding post to show up. With me and three other people trying to get it online. Time to look around for a better way to manage paxtonland.

Dave Winer has written a piece about women and their role in software development. Metafilter has taken notice and the backlash is swelling, I’m sure. Meg Hourihan has also written a brief rebuke to his remarks…. basically calling him a sexist pig. Sad, they both missed the point.

Since the formidible talent and presence of them both are so much more towering than mine, I doubt they will take notice of the following. However, I’m not writing it for them…

First, let me point out to you both that in the high and lofty professions of web programming and application development, there are more men. Live with it. It doesn’t take a complicated analogy to the days of hunter gatherers to demonstrate why. It’s simple. There are more men because there are more men interested in following that path. Period. It’s not a stone wall, glass ceiling, or a mans conspiracy. There’s no cultural guidelines to change, no lack of nurturing, assistance, or encouragement that will change that either. If you look laterally to networking, cabling and infrastructure, and engineering disciplines, you’ll find a much different story. If you “sink” lower into the bowels of a help desk and take a visual survey of support technicians you’ll find a much different story. If you sink even lower into the operations centers where mainframes exist and look at the people backing them up and ripping reports from their vast printers and you’ll not only find more women than men… you’ll also find more blacks (more on this in a minute).

Second, allow me to also point out that if you use conferences and discussions with conference attendees to help you prove your point about women, or Meg to disprove David’s points I weep for your sense of reality. These people aren’t real, they don’t have real jobs and they don’t have any sense of what is happening on the I.T. scene world wide at all. It’s been so long since they’ve been in the trenches coding a crappy project, supporting an application that is so mission critical they loose their job if it ever so much as burps… please, visit a local user group of oracle people, or microsoft developers, or networking people. You’ll see your arguments wither away into futility.

These are privaledged fields. There are educated and rare people occupying them, men and women alike. There are no discussions such as this taking place about garbage collectors, cafeteria workers, and people that “shovel shit” for a living. For people who live under beautiful circumstances, doing wonderful jobs at what they do, getting lots of attention for it… I would think that there are more pressing concerns to focus upon. C’mon… you want leaders and examples in technology, start with Grace Hopper and continue on from there. Do some research before you declare the problem must stop, mount campaigns and start a revolution.

If you want a torch to carry, or want to muse about cultural disparities and discrimination… take a look at the amount of black people in technical fields. I don’t think they are not in these fields as a matter of choice. Women have far more choices in life than anyone is willing to openly admit. Especially white women, even poor white women are more likely to rise to another class level then any demographic in our culture. In fact, the worm is turning for the sexes. Women can decide whether or not to go to college, if they stick with it, or not, drop back in if they feel like it. They can decide to work straight away, full time, part time, flex time, from home half the time, etc. When they get married, they can take time off plan the wedding, if they break up, they can take time off for that. If they have children, they can decide to take time off for that, more than a year and preserve their positions, they can come back to work, part time, flex time, work from home, etc. There are no lack of choices for professional, educated women today. The large majority of discrimination that is going on today is against single people. If you are single, childless, and female… you are expected to dedicate your life to work. If you are a man, single, married, married with children… you are expected to dedicate you life to work, until the day you die. Is that worth a closer look? I wonder.

I love this, a suspicious fiancee hires a private eye to film her to be hubby that she suspects is cheating on her, she walks in catches them and beats the snot out of them both.

Dads, sending your asshole sons off to college… finally? Is he whining that he needs a computer and eyeballing yours? Don’t get sucked into the hypebole from Dell/Gateway/Best Buy/Circuit City, Etc. trying to sell you a $999.99 back to school special (with a mandatory 3 year committment to AOL). Hell, you don’t need to spend even 500 bucks. For $299.00 you can get him a new Pentium III/600! 8x DVD-ROM Drive, 20GB IDE Hard Drive, 64MB of RAM, Speakers, Modem, and keyboard/mouse and obligatory Microsoft piece of shit operating system. All you need is a cheap ass monitor and a cheap ass printer (yes that is a Barbie printer) and you’re all set. Hardly a dent in the beer, truck parts, and deer huntin’ gear budget!

Of course if you want to give him your Packard Bell, go ahead… then you finally can get a decent computer.

DNA tests gets Idaho man off death row after 17 years. Charles I. Fain, 52 was accused and convicted of murder in 1982 of a nine year old girl. Not out of the woods, the judge gave the prosecutors until Sept. 4th. to retry him, or forget it. Wow, there you go folks… this is why I’m still on the fence about capitol punishment. I don’t want our government to have the power to put innocent people to death. In fact, here’s what I said about this almost a year ago:

“I cannot tolerate the fact that we are allowing the government to murder members of society. I do not trust the political, judicial, or any other entity established by our government not to personalize an issue such as this. Hence, this is the real key to the debate on the death penalty. Personalization. No one, in my opinion, can prevent themselves from personalizing decisions made that determine the nature of a punishment as final as the death penalty.

I’ve never heard a death penalty argument (either pro, or con) that is strictly empirical and impersonal. They always start, or end with: “If your (insert relative here) was (insert henous crime here), what would you want done?” Good god, has anyone thought that that is exactly what jurors are doing? Doesn’t anyone else realize that capitol cases are what help advance the prosecutors political careers via the extended publicity? Does anyone else realize that very rich and powerful law firms donate legal talent to defend capitol criminals because of the great publicity? Isn’t anyone else uncomfortable with construct that we have given our government the power to determine the life and death of it’s citizens? Finally, what system other than appeals, have we established to make sure that an innocent person isn’t put to death? How about this for personalization: If I was an innocent man standing accused of a capitol crime, facing death… my life in the hands of lawyers and career politicians, I would try and find a way to take my own life.”

Well, there you go… you can’t get more impersonal or empirical than DNA testing. There is the missing link from my above argument. We should allow anyone this defense in the face of doubt over guilt or innocence and life and death. The thought that innocent people have died because of this is unbearable to me. Merely because I am personalizing myself. I imagine myself strapped to a table taking the injection… all the while, my last thoughts are “but, I didn’t do it…” God help us.

Law school beckons as economy slows (login required, use “dean_paxton” as the user and “paxton” as the password) I was thinking that in the demise of the technical economy and the baby boomers apparent inability to manage it’s return to the black, perhaps it’s the best time to head to law school, or perhaps even medical school. What the hell, why not figure out a way to profit from their age (medicine) and deaths (probate attorneys). It’s only right and fitting, after all.

Stuntman’s parachute snared on statue of liberty. Got caught on the torch, what a drag… Apparently, this guy tries this stuff everywhere. It would be fine if he paid his own rescue bill and managed to somehow not endanger the lives of his rescuers as well.

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