…but even that might not keep you from getting screwed. Matt Welch relates the horror story that is defending yourself against a false paternity accusation.

It seems that there are just some people out there who want to hold a grudge about everything, even it doesn’t personally affect them. Take, for instance, those Christian conservatives that Bush is supposedly beholden to. I guess they are up in arms about the Mayor of San Francisco having city hall issue marriage certificates to gay couples. I don’t care if they decry it at all, but what disturbs me is this, from the Washington Times:

“I am just furious over what’s going on in California and over what the president is not doing in California,” a prominent evangelical leader confided. “He says he’s ‘troubled’ — he should be outraged. If he’s troubled, he should pick up the phone and call [California Republican Gov.] Arnold [Schwarzenegger] and tell him we want action against the rogue mayor who is breaking the law.”

I guess to these evangelicals, federalism only applies when the “law” being defended is God’s, as it was in the Alabama Supreme Court.

Anyway, in contrast, Harry Browne wrote a good piece about what we should do to defend marriage.

I love how The Economist is so blunt when it comes to defending free trade. In an editorial printed today, the newspaper rightly attacks those who see new opportunities for protectionism whenever the economy seems to shift. My favorite quote:

Services constitute much the larger part of every advanced economy. At the end of this process, what will be left? Gosh, Adam Smith never thought of this. Trade policy needs to be completely rethought.

Well, actually, no.

In another article on the actual effects of “outsourcing” or “offshoring,” it is aruged that the disruption to the economy is much more slight than often proclaimed, and that whatever job losses occur, they are replaced by higher numbers of higher paying jobs.

It’s very refreshing when there are buffoons out there on every side such as John Edwards and Pat Buchanan singing a Siren song of protectionism to anyone willing to listen…

Leave it to the Randians to demonstrate how selfish love is. Pretty interesting take on Valentine’s Day though…

Don’t you hate it when someone posts a rare source of a Nirvana show but not in the standard FLAC or SHN formats. Instead it was posted in BIN/CUE format which is intended to be burned straight to a CD. Now since I am just going to listen to it through the computer anyway and I have many, many gigabytes of hard drive space I wanted to either find something to play the file or extract the info. I ventured on over to DVDRhelp because it is one of the greatest websites ever. Seriously, if you are into digital video, video formats, burning things (on media that is), or anything with DVDs, VCDs, and the like, you MUST look through the site. It tells you how to do everything. OK, continuing, I found a few programs that would do what I wanted. I downloaded one I had heard of before: ISObuster. The free functions did all I needed it to do. I opened the CUE sheet and it knew what the burned CD would look like and I was able to extract WAV files from the disc image. I was then able to easily encode them into my favorite lossless audio format, FLAC, with the easy and powerful FLAC frontend GUI. Now I can smile as I listen to a previously uncirculating source of Nirvana’s 1992 Reading Festival show. This was the crowning accomplishment of my day.

New versions of my favorite browser and email client are out today. Mozilla Firefox 0.8 (previously Mozilla Firebird), the browser, and Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5, the email client. I highly recommend these for everyone, especially if you are just a user of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Both of these (free!) products have much more functionality than the Microsoft counterparts in my opinion and they make using the web that much more pleasant.

I don’t like the laundromat. First of all, it feels a little strange pulling all of my underwear out in front of anyone to see. Another thing is that I’m too accustomed to the Auto-Sensing Temperature Dry on the dryer at home. I just turn it on that setting and the clothes are all dry when it’s done. But no, not at the laundromat. Because they have to charge, it can only be done using Timed Dry. Eight minutes for 25¢ isn’t unreasonable, but I just don’t know how long it takes to dry things. Especially when the load finishes, the clothes are still warm and so it is rather difficult to determine if they are warm damp, or warm dry. By the time I got home, there were a couple of things not completely dry. Some spots on some socks that could’ve used some extra heat and a towel that was slightly damp. Damn the laundromat.

I’ll learn.

It might be kind of sad that the only thing I have to blog about is my blog. I just wanted to note the people coming to my site with strange searches because it amuses me.

I decided to do it today because there were two seperate people searching for similar things who both clicked on my site. One search was from MSN and included the terms “scales that are over 450lb” while the second was from Google looking for “450lb scale”. My post about the guy who wrote in to The Economist was what their searches found.

Another amusing one was someone searching for the exact sentence that I plucked from the article on outsourcing and used as my title for that post: “The invisible hand is giving him the finger.”

My post about the Les Claypool Frog Brigade New Year’s Eve show has generated the most clicks from searches. Many people were searching for something about the show, many searching for something about the opener, DJ Disk and Ramulen. The most interesting one to me, though, was the person in Concord, NH searching for “dreadlocked girls”.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say.