And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when allof God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

– Martin Luther King, Jr. from The Great March on Washington

It’s almost 50 years later, and this rings truer than ever. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever get here.

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Easily my most favorite Sesame Street celeb video clip. It speaks to the geek in me, obviously.

The thing with it, though, is that when it comes to playing games, you have to be invested. Let me explain. Nadine bought me Gran Tourismo 5 for Christmas. It’s good stuff. I like racing games, and the GT series has always been known for its realism and fun. So great. Tonight I decide that I want to try out the game. So I turn on the PS3, pop the disc in, and fire it up to find… a screen that says “Not so fast, you can’t use it until you update it.” sigh Plus, this update is huge. So it starts to download. An error comes up. Turns out my internet connection went down. Click OK on the error (or, in reality, hit the X key on the controller). Game comes up and says “oh hey, this would work a lot better if you install a bunch of data onto your system first”. Allow that, it takes almost 30 minutes. Grow old and feeble. Data install finishes. Game starts to launch and then says “oh hey, you know that update you started? We need to finish that.” Data starts downloading again. Looks like it’s almost done. Rejoice. Going to enjoy driving a virtual car on a virtual track. Update data installs. Get excited. hair starts blowing back in anticipation. Have world crushed when a 1GB plus update starts to download after. Lose desire to play game.

This isn’t the first game this has happened to for me, as I’m sure it’s not for others. The thing is that it’s frustrating. I admit that as big of a geek as I claim to be, I’m little more than a casual gamer. I got other things to do. I don’t even know if there’s a way for Sony to make this better in PlayStation 4 or what have you. Until then, I guess I’ll just stare at this download screen and go on with my real life.

Technorati Tags: geek, gran tourismo, playstation 3

This is just the leftovers.

That, my friends, is just the leftovers, and not even all of them. Party times at our place are good times all around.

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If you’re any sort of savvy shopper, you’d realize a few things. First, those things they put on super ridiculous prices, like a sub-$200 flat screen TV? They usually won’t have any more than say four of five of each in the store. So unless you’re the idiot that camped out since Tuesday, you’re not getting it. Those crazy deals are really just to amp you up and get you into the store to buy the regularly priced stuff. Secondly, those products are of shoddy quality, especially the TV’s. Did you know that most TV makers have something like eight or nine different TV lines from super budget to so fancy it should just think for you? Those Black Friday deals are likely a subset of the cheapest line they have. Maybe it doesn’t matter to most, but you won’t get a lot of good features that are in the new electronics these days.

Beyond all that, when it comes to regular, non-eletronics, you do realize that you can usually get better deals on a lot of things on other weeks leading up to the holiday? Retailers are so pushed to make things happen that they’ll really ratchet up the deals as they get closer to get that sale.

And even further on, you can almost aways get better deals online. Amazon is a wonderful marketplace for a reason. Which is really the future of everything. So let’s get with the program and just stay home after we eat that Thanksgiving dinner and enjoy ourselves.

(and yes, I totally ripped off that headline from Think Geek)

Technorati Tags: black friday, crazy, shopping

Not to be a broken record, but a couple of quick things:

1. It seems fairly obvious now that Penn State tried to sweep a lot of this under the rug. Yes, Paterno reported it up the food chain to his superiors, but both he and they did less than the bare minimum to confront this. I am still waiting for someone to explain to me why the police were never called at all. I guess it’s true that nothing comes before The Program.
2. Why didn’t the guy who saw the assault happen not stop it right then and there? Why did he go home, call his dad, then call JoePa… the next day? Nothing smells right about this at all.
3. The similarities between this pattern of abuse and the Catholic Church abuse scandals is eerie. The abuse by those who were trusted, the powerful men who turned a mostly blind eye, the attempts to cover it all up, everything. The only real difference here is that Penn State at least seems sort of interested in some form of credibility by forcing out those who did nothing.

I think it’s the last part that has me most conflicted, because the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church strike a raw nerve with me, and have for a while now. I was never abused, but I was pretty involved in the Church growing up being in Catholic school, and being an altar boy in my parish, etc., I understand about getting close with people who can take advantage. This is why it makes sense to me that parents trusted their kids with this guy, in the way that plenty of people trusted their sons with their local priest. In any event, it all sickens me to no end.

I hope that in the long run, we see justice served for these kids who were abused by this person. It will be a lot more than a lot of kids that were abused by the hand of the Church will ever see, and that continues to be a huge disgrace.

Technorati Tags: catholic church, jerry sandusky, joe paterno, sex abuse

Rising Into the Mist

One World Trade rising into the misty sky. Taken about ten days ago on my way into work when train delays forced me to take the PATH. Kind of hauntingly beautiful.

I remember how they used to say that the weather at the top of the original Twin Towers could be vastly different than it was at street level because the towers were a quarter mile up into the sky. One WTC looks like it will be no different.

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Economic Wha?

That’s from a great cartoon from Tom Tomorrow that’s up at Daily Kos which I think succinctly sums up a lot of the media coverage that the Occupy Wall Street protests are getting. When you’re little more than an arm of the Wall Street machine, this sort of thing must make no sense at all.

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Technorati Tags: steve jobs, think different