So, here I am again. I got here a little bit before 4:00 yesterday, but didn’t much feel like tromping down to the Mall to see what was left of the Earth Day concert. Instead I watched the Coal Miner Memorial (was surprised at what a good reception Obama and Biden got; maybe there’s hope for this country after all). One of these days I have to stop at the Anthracite Museum on the way down. Then I walked over to Whole Foods (which was really, really crowded, and smelled kind of like piss) to buy some groceries since my room has a kitchen. It was too busy, so all I got was beer. Warm beer at that. Then I proceeded to turn the wrong way and wound up walking way out of my way, which wasn’t bad, other than it’s too damn hot down here. Between that and the six hour drive, my foot was killing me by the time I got back. Fortunately, my training thing is right across the street, so I don’t have far to walk to get there.

No boobleheads for me, I’m afraid. I’ll be leaving in a few hours for DC to attend a few days of training. While I’m happy to not be at work for a few days, I’m not really looking forward to being away from home. I guess I’m kind of a baby like that. On the bright side, I’ll be staying in a hotel with a 32″ plasma screen and a Playstation, with a daily complimentary happy hour, so at least I won’t be stuck in a cinderblock wall dorm room. There’s also wireless Internet access, of course (my #1 criterion), so odds are I’ll still be able to post, but if you don’t hear from me for a while, you’ll know something’s wrong with the connection (or I died in a fiery car crash on the way down or something). Anyhow, have a good Sunday, and I’ll say hello to Barry for ya.

Ever hear of a company called HTC (the High Tech Computer Corporation)? They make mobile phones and are, in fact, the largest manufacturer of phones that use the Android operating system, which is the free and open source software released through the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), which was spearheaded by Google, but includes companies like Texas Instruments, Broadcom, HTC, Intel, LG, Motorola, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile and has the goal of developing open standards for mobile devices. Enter Apple and the iPhone.

Words like “free” and “open” are anathema to a company like Apple, and it sees Android as an enormous threat. And when Apple feels threatened, it sues. They’d love to go after Android directly, but I reckon it’s pretty hard to sue open source software. Instead, they’ve decided to sue HTC, and have filed a lawsuit alleging 20 patent infringements for patents ranging from 1995 up ’til Feb 2010.

Apple has much deeper pockets than HTC, so don’t be surprised if you see some sort of settlement that will ultimately result in huge licensing fees for Android-based phones (which will of course be passed along to the rest of us). Then again, if Google and the rest of the OHA get involved, this could drag on for years.

As I understand patents (and I’m certainly no expert), the original idea was to encourage innovation. The idea being that, if you came up with some cool new invention, you got the exclusive right to make money off it for a certain period of time (say, 20 years, though the terms vary) in exchange for the full public disclosure of how it works. Good for the inventor, good for the public.

That’s kind of changed over the years – especially in the Tech Sector. It’s not unlike how our economy has shifted. Used to be people made shit and sold it to make money. Shit got manufactured, people had jobs; not a perfect system by any means, but at least we were making stuff. Now, people push paper back and forth and take a cut out of each transaction to make money. Nothing gets made (except money), and fewer and fewer people have jobs (or homes). Similarly, companies buy up intellectual property (patents and copyrights) and sit on it, waiting like vultures for a chance to pounce on some new innovator for patent infringement and force a settlement. Good for the vultures, good for the lawyers, not so good for the rest of us.

Our lawmakers and the courts are pretty much clueless when it comes to technology (SCOTUS, for example, doesn’t understand the difference between e-mail and pagers, and of course we all remember the then 83-yr old former Chairman/Ranking Member of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation describing the Internet as “not a big truck,” but a “series of tubes” while debating the rather important issue of Net Neutrality). This has led to companies getting ridiculous patents (and settlements) for things like “1-Click” checkout (clicking on a button to check out) and “parallel tasking” (basically, doing two things at once). Hell, Google even got a patent for displaying patents, and Microsoft got a patent for “page up and page down.”

The patent system is in desperate need of reform, and people who don’t know the difference between a pager and an e-mail, or think you can “send an Internet,” over a series of tubes shouldn’t be in charge of deciding the future of the technology the don’t understand.

It’d be like having me decide who wins next year’s Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group Grammy.

Some good news on the environmental front, for a change, as NYS said it will impose strict regulations on drilling for natural gas (aka, hydrofracking).

New York State environmental officials announced on Friday that they would impose far stricter regulations on a controversial type of natural gas drilling in the upstate area that supplies most of New York City’s drinking water, making it highly unlikely that any drilling would be done there.

Although they did not impose an outright ban on drilling, state officials said that any natural gas company would have to conduct a separate environmental impact review for each well it proposed to drill in the Catskills watershed, which supplies the city.

Those rules also apply to the smaller Skaneateles Lake watershed, which supplies drinking water to Syracuse and some other communities.

In other areas, companies would face a far less cumbersome permit process that would rely on the state’s own environmental assessment of where drilling can be allowed.

In other words, the drilling companies can go frack themselves.

Finally, I just have to mention this. On the Today Show this morning, they briefly showed security camera footage of a homeless man lying stabbed and dying on a NYC sidewalk as people walked around him (and somebody even took a cell phone picture of him). Then the B-Team Today Show newsreader twit segued into a fluff piece on how the most expensive house in America (the Spelling Mansion somewhere in California) is on the market, which she, Amy, and Lester all had a nice lengthy giggle over.

Do these fucking people get the irony there (that’s a rhetorical question, of course; I know they don’t)? They did the teevee equivalent of walking up to a human being dying on the sidewalk, taking a picture of him, then moving along, window shopping and giggling at the prices of all the fancy baubles.

I really hate these people. But they’re gonna have Buddy the hero German Shepherd on, so I gotta watch.

I hate to get all footbally and stuff, but a quick question for the Broncos: Tebow? Really?

Just ten more days, and I get to go see a Podiatrist. Any idea how many chickens you need for a visit to the foot doctor under the POP (Pullets for Podiatry) program? I just hope frozen is OK, ‘cuz I don’t really have a live chicken connection. Well, except for Melina, but Connecticut is a long way to go to pick up chicks (especially at my age). Plus I’m boycotting the state of CT until either Joe Lieberman is voted out of office or I have some reason to go there.

Speaking of CT and picking up chicks…

A student-teacher from Connecticut has been arrested in Central New York, and is accused of having a sexual relationship with an underage girl.

State Police tell CNY Central that on Tuesday they apprehended 30-year-old Micah Saul Brown at the Quality Inn on Collamer Road in East Syracuse. Troopers say that Brown admitted to them during an interview that he traveled to the Syracuse area to have sex with girls he believed to be 14 and 16 years old, which were actually undercover police officers posing as the girls online.

Hard to believe a good-lookin’ guy like that needs to troll AOL chat rooms to hook up with underage girls.

No doubt everyone’s heard by now that the oil rig that was burning in the Gulf of Mexico, spewing black smoke and oil into the atmosphere has now sunk, spewing oil into the water. This is why I’m so proud of our environmental President for opening up more of our coastal shores for drilling. No reason Louisiana should have all the fun.

When Ben Heinrich’s workshop caught on fire, he told his German Shepherd, Buddy, “We need to get help.” So Buddy went off and got help. He flagged down a State Trooper (who was out trying to find the fire in the remote Alaskan town of Caswell Lakes but was lost, as his GPS had frozen up), and led him to the fire (pausing occasionally to make sure the trooper was still following). Thanks to Buddy’s quick thinking, while the workshop was destroyed, Ben’s house was (mostly) unscathed. In case you’re keeping track, this is reason #4,328 why dogs are better than cats (and GPSs). I mean, seriously. Shitting in a box is pretty much their only trick (cats, not GPSs).

Well, another week has slipped on by. Another show and tell this afternoon to get through, and then we can put this one in the books.

Ah, been a pain in the ass couple of days around here. First, I’m getting really tired of this friggin’ Mac laptop losing the wireless connection constantly. It just drops for no reason, and then I have to turn the radio off and back on again (and there’s no hardware switch on the damn thing, either – I guess they figure that’d just be asking for a rush on the “geniuses” when throngs of average macsters couldn’t figure out why for they’re wireless don’t work no more, or maybe at the rate their hardware fails, they figure it’d just be one more thing to break). It drops a few times a session when I’m not even moving around with, which is pretty annoying, but when I try roaming from one access point to another (say, from downstairs to upstairs or outside), and the stupid thing will drop constantly. Needless to say, none of my other wireless (Windows, Linux, Android, etc) stuff has a problem. I tried some updates (there’s another thing that bugs me; I thought Windows was a pain in the ass with the updates, but the Mac ones seem more frequent, and, damn they’re HUGE). That frickin’ update icon jumping up and down bugs me, too. Look, I don’t want anything to do with iTunes, OK? So, don’t keep telling me there’s an update for it!

Then yesterday, as many of you may have heard, McAfee (which I’ve never really liked) released a DAT file (an update) for their virus scanner which identified a harmless (and somewhat necessary) Windows file as a virus, quarantining and (in some cases) deleting the file. In networked enterprise environments, this had the effect of causing Windows XP SP3 machines to reboot constantly and/or disable certain capabilities (like copy and paste, the toolbar, some properties pages, etc.). This is quite a hassle when you work in a networked enterprise environment that uses McAfee. It didn’t really affect me all that much, as I was able to kill my computer in time, and didn’t allow McAfee to delete the file. A quick power down/up, and I was good to go. For about 2,500 of our 6,000 computers, though, things weren’t quite as good, and IT people had to go and touch a lot of them. Bummer for them.

And of course, this morning, no DB connection for this website. A couple weeks ago, the web host decided to enforce new password rules which required me to change my server passwords. Not the database ones, though. Not until some time last night or this morning, that is when, without warning, everything went to hell. Took me a while to figure out what the deal was, but now we’re back up and running.

So, OK world. Whattya got for me next?

I hate to say this out loud for fear of jinxing it, but I think it’s possible that Obama and his entourage finally get it, and realize that no matter what they do, the Republicans will oppose, stonewall, and demonize it. So apparently Obama figures he might as well appoint an actual liberal to the Supreme Court.

“It doesn’t matter who he chooses, there is going to be a big ‘ol fight over it. So he doesn’t have to get sidetracked by those sorts of concerns,” the official told me. The GOP has attempted to obstruct “anything of consequence” put forth by the Obama administration since he took office, the official said. “The president is making this decision with a pretty clear view that whoever he chooses is going to provoke a strong reaction on the right,” the official added.

Well, duh. Welcome to reality, Mr. President. Though I figure it’s likely that this is just posturing, and Obama will appoint some “centrist” (which has come to mean a person to the right-of-center), and then say, “see, I told ya,” when chinless fuck Mitch McConnell acts like a prissy little bitch in opposing him or her.

Speaking of prissy little bitch Senators, some xenophobic konservative nobody is calling on li’l Lindsey Graham to come out of the closet and admit he’s gay.

William Gheen, head of the conservative, anti-“amnesty,” anti-illegal immigration group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), spoke at a Greenville, S.C. Tea Party rally this weekend and called for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to “come out of that log cabin closet.”

According to Gheen, being gay is “a secret that Lindsey Graham has.”

Secret?

Gheen told the crowd: “I hope this secret isn’t being used as leverage over Senator Graham, so today I think Senator Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality.”

“Barney Frank is more honest and brave than you,” Gheen continued….

Well, that pretty much goes without saying. There’s video of this, and I tried to watch it, but Gheen is one of these loudmouth sanctimonious pricks that I can’t stand. I got through about five words, and shut it off, not wanting to start my day all pissed off and aggravated.

The no longer mavericky Senator from the great State of Arizona – St. John McCain – has declared that illegal immigrants are deliberately causing accidents on the freeway. I’m not sure what their plan is (maybe they want to ensure they get picked up and deported?), other than it must be truly insidious.

Great news for New Yorkers who were on the verge of having to open doors and hail cabs all by themselves: a Doorman strike has been avoided with a new deal between the Doorman’s Union (who knew?) and, um, whoever it is that represents Door Management. Management agreed to a not exactly stellar (almost) 10% raise over four years and no cuts significant cuts in benefits. This is good news for rich people, I think, who might have been forced to choose between paying more money (which we all know they really, really hate), and opening a door manually. Not that living in a building with a doorman means you’re wealthy, of course. It just seems that way to those of us out here in “real” America.

What with all the excitement (and fatigue) associated with yesterday’s Dolphy Day, I failed to notice that it was 4/20 (aka, Marijuana Day – not to mention Hitler’s birthday). Alas, I was unable to properly celebrate the pot part (and, not being a neo-Nazi skinhead, I have no desire to celebrate the other), but I’d like to take this opportunity to plead with you Californians out there to vote to legalize pot this November (the vote’s in November, right?). My hope is that this will be the big breakthrough, and, once the sky hasn’t fallen, there will be a cascade effect that finally leads to marijuana legalization all over the US (or at least here in NY).

Either that, or I’m moving to the Golden State.

Oh well, got a show and tell to do at work today, so I better get crackin’.

Somebody though it wold be a good idea to have fireworks that went on for what seemed like hours at about two o’clock this morning. The dogs did not concur, which of course meant that there would be no sleep for me last night. My guess is that today is “Dolphy Day” at Lemoyne College (fun fact: although Lemoyne’s mascot is a dolphin, Dolphy Day has nothing to do with it – it’s named for Jazz great Eric Dolphy), the start of which is kept a secret until it starts in the middle of the night with fireworks, ushering in a day of drunken revelry and the skipping of classes. Or the cancellation of classes, since the school’s administration long ago realized that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and turned the unofficial “holiday” into an official one. Say what you want about the Jesuits, they’re usually pretty smart (and not opposed to a good party). I’m not opposed to a good party myself, but I’m pretty sick and frickin’ tired of the damn fireworks in the middle of the night. Some of us have to go to work in the morning.

Folks are all up in arms in these parts due to the fact that all the “good” tickets were pre-sold for the upcoming Rush concert in September. I know what you’re thinking: why would people want to see Rush Limbaugh in concert? No, it’s not that Rush, but the Canadian three-man rock and roll band. And, yes, apparently they are still alive. There will be an awful lot of geezers in the fairgrounds grandstands in September, that’s for sure. As for me, I saw Rush about 30 years ago (as I recall, Molly Hatchet was the warm-up band, but I could be wrong, ‘cuz I may have been just a little wasted at the time), and that was pretty much enough to tide me over for the rest of my life. I do like the line from “Tom Sawyer” that goes, “no his mind is not for rent to any god or government,” though.

That’s how I know they have nothing to do with Limbaugh, whose mind (and the minds of his followers, such as they are) is most certainly for rent, sale, or long-term lease.

Speaking of rush, I reckon I ought to, ‘cuz it’s about that time.

Today’s the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, which led to the racial profiling of clean-cut white guys. Well, not really. White guys can still do pretty much whatever they want (often with the praise of teabaggers and Republicans), whether it’s flying an airplane into a building (as long as it’s an IRS building), shooting a doctor at church, or screwing people out of billions of dollars. It’s also the anniversary of Waco, which of course led to Republicans and the ancestors of teabaggers to praise the illegal stockpiling of weapons (as long as that stockpiling is done by white guys, of course).

The brave Republicans are goose-stepping in unison in opposition of Financial Reform. This despite Barack “I’ll never learn” Obama making a major concession in hopes of getting GOP support. Whatever. I can’t decide which bunch I’m more tired of. All of them, I guess.

Speaking of tired, it’s Monday again, and I’m beat. If I didn’t have to go to work today, I’d be in Boston running the marathon. Bummer. Maybe I can find an XBox version.

On Press the Meat – Timmy Geithner and a roundtable of Gov. Ed Rendell (D-PA), Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), National Journal’s Ron Brownstein, and Telemundo’s Jose Diaz-Balart.

Faze the Nation has Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts.

On Fux News Sunday, Weaselface Wallace has former maverick St. John McCain and Gen. Ray Odierno, top U.S. commander in Iraq.

At the Goebbels networks, it’s the Big Dog, Bill Clinton, and a roundtable of George :jerk: Will, Donna Brazile, Al Hunt and the global warming denying WSJ hack, Kim Strassel.

Over at CNN Fareed Zakaria has a conversation with the Foreign Minister of Poland (aka, the guy who wasn’ton that plane), plus the man who effectively oversees the global financial system (who is that? I guess you’ll have to watch to find out), and a debate over the Obama administration’s approach toward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

And, finally, happy belated birthday to Soupy’s granddaughter. Hard to believe she’s 8 years old already.

A 24-yr old woman from Manchester is claiming that falling off her Wii has turned her into a sex addict.

Randy Amanda Flowers needs 10 sex sessions a day after the slip-up.

And now the slightest of vibrations, from mobile phones to food processors, turns her on.

The catering worker said: “It began as a twinge down below before surging through my body. Sometimes it built up into a trembling orgasm.”

I don’t have a Wii ‘cuz it isn’t HD, but now I’m thinking it would make a nice birthday present for my wife. An early present, at that. And maybe we could host an exchange student from England, too.