AOL is offering a promotional deal through the end of February where for 99 cents you can download movies and watch them on your local machine. This is the first pricing model for digital distribution I’ve seen that actually works for me – I would pay 99 cents to in effect rent a movie in the comfort of my own home. The restrictions – you only get to ‘keep’ it for 30 days and once you start watching the film you have only 24 hours to finish watching it – seem reasonable to me, and hackers will end up breaking the DRM anyway so if the restrictions bother you I’m sure it will end up being possible to bypass them. Too bad this is a limited time deal – if someone moves to a model like this I might actually return to the practice of ‘renting’ movies again.

Oh…you can read up on the details of the deal over on arstechnica

..comes this life-sized replica of Han Solo frozen in Carbonite, rendered in Lego. Impressive, there’s no doubt. Things like this make me less self conscious of my own odd hobbies and interests.

If you spend a little time digging around on Medscape’s site, you’ll discover what seems to be an overwhelming body of medical research that suggests the high sugar/high calorie diet that’s common in the western countries is a significant contributer to increasing health risks related to obesity and heart disease. Given this, why do you suppose the Bush administration has chosen to oppose the World Health Organization’s plan to fight back against the rising tide of obesity by helping people understand the negative health consequences of inappropriate consumption of soft drinks and junk food? Cynical person that I am, my conclusion is that the Bush Junta is more concerned with campaign contributions from big agribusiness and the food conglomerates than it is with the health of U.S. citizens. Of course with this issue like so many others, it seems like the mainstream media will ignore it and the general public will remain blissfully unaware. Spread the word says I, this represents my latest 2 bits 😉

The Inquirer has an article with details on how easy it is to falsify the feedback and other profile information on ebay. This is a serious issue if you use ebay regularly, until they fix this it means you can’t trust the feedback profile on the item page, you need to click through to the seller’s feedback page, and you need to not use internet explorer when you’re doing it. Honestly, people who use IE have to be clueless or insane, this URL re-write bug has been known for over a month now and Microsoft has done nothing, while their customers get victimized by scams like this.

..and I don’t go. That’s about the best thing I can say about it. I still have a job, a new title even, and presumably some new responsibilities. But I have a new supervisor who is a pale shadow of the one I used to have, I have to work with a couple of folks who have said and done some really unpleasant things about and to me over the last several years, and ultimately I think the college has really diluted what used to be one of its strengths. I know that sounds self serving, but the fact that institutions like the New York Times and funding sources like the National Endowment for the Arts were picking up on some of the stuff we were producing serves as evidence of the kind of things we were capable of. I don’t see those kinds of projects emerging from our newly structured group, and in fact I am suspicious we won’t even see them proposed. But still, at the end of the day I still have a job, and further evidence that the CIO has some faith in my abilities emerged so….what can I say. I’m trying to be optimistic and looking forward rather than backwards.

I have these moments, every now and then, when I’m almost embarrased to be a geek. Today is one of those days. While browsing rpg.net I happened across a link to this picture of a jr high school dnd club. Good lord, one of those kids looks a lot like I did at that age, bad haircut and all, and damned if I wasn’t in the dnd club for a while. While I tend to remember those times fondly, looking back on it now is almost painful when I look at that picture.

Somewhere I have copies of a newspaper story that was published about us during that time, I need to dig that out and get the scans online. May as well share my embarrasment fully 😉