LaCie drive, part II

So at the suggestion of the helpful LaCie tech support dude, I tried
another USB cable I had lying around and shit, that fixed it.
Surprising to get a bad cable these days, but I did. They should
really check their supplier -- sucks to make people think your
hardware is bogus when it's just a cheapo dead cable. So the massive
mac-dad 500gb drive works fine, condemnation retracted.

New macbook pro vid conferencing kicks ass!

Dude, you can have up to 4 people vid conf'ing simultaneously at no
charge over a decent connection in full-motion/sound vid. Sweet!

Active.com's interface sucks

The Active.com service is great, thank god someone made it possible
to register online for all the millions of low-budget, web-challenged
events that go on all the time. But their website is seriously
weak. Half the time I use it I can't get past the first page because
of 1000 "check here if you're over 13" and "check here if you're over
18" and "initial here if you want a rabbi to bless your hot dog".
Can we hire a UI designer people? And while you're at it, how about
employing some web technologies newer than 1999? Say like
remembering who I am... they have cookies nowadays, use them chumps.
Try out Google calendar for inspiration on a great UI.

LaCie external drives are crap

Yesterday I bought a 500gb USB 2.0 "big disk" from LaCie. It doesn't
work. I knew I'd have to reformat it because it comes with NTFS
(windows) standard, but the Mac disk utility doesn't even see the
drive. I tried 3 different computers, no dice. The instructions say
nothing about such a possibility. I therefore have to assume it's
defective. Told my friend about it, and he said he also had trouble
with LaCie external drives. So that settles that: don't buy their
stuff, unless you like returning to Best Buy frequently. Very
disappointing.

"Price Gouging" by Big Oil

Nothing could irk me more (well, other than apostrophe misuse) than
the bulls*$&t bandying about of "price gouging" by "Big Oil". This
is nothing more than a cheap election year red herring by mostly (but
not only) democratic politicians calculated to curry votes from the
uninformed. Wise up, people. No oil company controls the market, it
is supply and demand that set prices. You know as well as I that the
problems are these:

• MTBE being illegal, with not enough ethanol to replace it (granted,
  MTBE is nasty stuff that SHOULD be illegal)
  
• Refinery capacity (due to an onerous permitting process and
  reluctance of refiners to spend billion$ when the market could
  collapse at any time)
  
• Unwillingness to allow drilling in the US, despite low risk and high reserves
  
• Supply! we are fighting China for a finite amount of oil,
  obviously the price is going to go up. this is a good thing! now
  how about some decent BICYCLE PATHS? get people out of their damn SUVs.
  

If you really think ExxonMobil is ripping you off, BUY THEIR STOCK, DUMMY. The pay a decent dividend and you'll never go wrong with that
equity. If you want to ride the ethanol train, buy Archer-Daniels-
Midland stock - they are going big in both ethanol and biodiesel.
Love how big agricultural-products companies are competing with Big Oil now, very cool.

If you have some sort of "moral" objection to that (makes no sense), then here are simple ways you can beat high gas prices:

• RIDE A BICYCLE - lose your spare tire while you're at it
  
• Buy a VW Golf TDI (or Jetta/Passat/Touareg) - 50 mpg and does
  burnouts (hybrids are for suckers, they get 35mpg or so)
  
• Put biodiesel in your Golf TDI - it supports American farmers, it
  pollutes less, and it even smells good
  
• Better yet, run straight vegetable oil in your old Mercedes diesel
  -- your friendly neighborhood Sikh is happy to give it to you after he
  cooks up some delicious Indian food and your car will both run great
  and smell great from it. It's FREE!
  
• And by all means get rid of your stupid f$*%ing Hummer! GOD!
  (like napoleon D. would say)