Rumors

A great time was had by all for my birthday on the Mass Ave Pub Crawl on April 26th…   Thanks to everyone for showing up and making the night so memorable!

While surfing today, I ran across another Indianapolis pub crawl coming up in June.  

Check it out.. sounds like fun! 

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Three women: one engaged, one married and one a mistress, are chatting about their relationships and decided to amaze their men. That night all three will wear black leather bras, stiletto heels and a mask over their eyes.  After a few days they meet up for lunch.

The engaged woman: The other night when my boyfriend came over he found me with a black leather bodice, tall stilettos and a mask. He saw me andsaid, ‘You are the woman of  my life. I love you.’ Then we made love all night long.

The mistress: Me too! The other night I met my lover at his office and I was wearing the leather bodice, heels, mask over my eyes and a raincoat.  When I opened the raincoat he didn’t say a word, but we had wild sex all night.

The married woman: I sent the kids to stay at my mother’s house for the night. When my husband came home I was wearing the leather bodice, blackstockings, stilettos and a mask over my eyes. As soon as he came in the door and saw me he said, ‘What’s for dinner, Batman?’

Thanks, Jeff! 

In one of the most shocking studies of the year, Indianapolis has topped a list of Sexually Satisfied Cities.Seems sort of surreal…. ;) 

Looks like Apple is doing just fine, thank you very much.  The old days of 4-6% market saturation are long gone.

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The Stone Temple Pilots have been named to headline the Indianapolis 500 Carb Day festivities.  After having Kid Rock here last year, it will be a welcome change. 

This is consistently one of the biggest parties in the city and is usually a fantastic time.  2 years ago, the IMPD was a bit aggressive at early intervention by Taser, but last year seemed to be a bit more subdued.

Looking forward to it this year with the unification of the IRL and Champ Car series.  Should be a very competitive and enjoyable race.

I’ve never really thought about this, but it is fairly annoying to have to show your receipt on the way out the door of big box retailers. Basically, they assume you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent. Here is an interesting story of how Wal-Mart treated one of it’s customers.

Next time I go to one of the Big Box retailers, I’m going to see how far they push this issue. It is kind of ridiculous that right after my purchase I have to “show my receipt”. What does that prove anyway? If I were a shoplifter, wouldn’t I have the item stuffed in my pants or something, anyway?

Just more reason to shop with locally owned merchants. At least they don’t make me feel like a criminal when I leave.

From Mad TV.

With the recent announcement that the Indy Racing League (IRL) and Champ Car World Series (CCWS) have finally came together as one series, there have been a number of releases about races and teams. Here are some of the recent stories:

• Release from the IRL home page
• Conquest announces a 2 car team for the new unified Indy car series
• Full line up for IRL?
• Making the IRL/CCWS merger work
• Robin Miller from Speedtv.com interviews Tony George and Kevin Kalkhoven
• No race in Cleveland this year

There is a news conference regarding unification scheduled for Feb 27, 2008 that will be carried live on indycar.com.

Looks to be a great season for the IRL!

So freaking cute!

Had to chuckle when I saw this video. It reminds me of the day when coffee shops were “Cyber Cafe’s”, which was only a few years ago. Interesting how people think it is so weird or funny now. Enjoy!

Looks like the open wheel unification may be the real deal.  Open wheel racing is some of the most exciting racing on the planet and the long overdue merging of the two series will only increase the competition and excitement.  It will be wonderful to see some of the races come back together, including Long Beach and Edmonton.

Maybe this will be the year that Indy Car and open wheel racing makes some headway against the NASCAR juggernaut.  

Just too funny to not pass along…

Looks like the BitTorrent folks are at it again and have developed a workaround to blocking by Comcast.  This is the same old story that always has the exact same ending, you can’t beat the hackers.  Period.  Be it Comcast, Microsoft, DirectTV or any large company that attempts to create technology to keep people out, there will always be many more people trying to get in..and frankly, some of them are, and always will be, smarter and more resourceful than your people.

From the blog posting:

BitTorrent throttling is not a new phenomenon, ISPs have been doing it for years. When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic most BitTorrent clients introduced a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. This was the beginning of an ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers, which is about to enter new level.

Unfortunately, protocol header encryption doesn’t help against more aggressive forms of BitTorrent interference, like the Sandvine application used by Comcast. A new extension to the BitTorrent protocol is needed to stay ahead of the ISPs, and that is exactly what is happening right now.

In the immortal words of David Byrne of The Talking Heads..  “Same as it ever was…”

As someone who tries to take full advantage of the many new, better and legal ways to download electronic content from the industry, there is still much that is not available.  This is extremely frustrating.  However, the industry needs to focus attention on making content more readily available, with healthy competition to keep prices in check.  The ISP’s (i.e. Comcast) need to focus on keeping their tubes big enough to cover what they have advertised and sold to us in the first place.   Marketing types need to fully comprehend the meaning of the word unlimited and throughput before they are allowed to willy nilly advertise such silliness at what now is claimed to be unsustainable pricing.

Frankly, it sounds more like building shareholder value to me, but I’ve been called cynical for less.

Yet another final nail has been driven into the HD-DVD casket and frankly, I could care less. BluRay is emerging as the clear winner in this pointless format war reminiscent of the old VHS vs. Betamax wars. Just in time for well-done electronic distribution to kick the snot out of it. Well done, Sony!

From the article:

The nation’s largest retailer said Friday it has decided to sell only Blu-ray DVDs and hardware in its 4,000 U.S. stores and no longer carry rival HD DVD offerings.

The announcement comes five days after Netflix Inc. said it will stop carrying rentals in Toshiba Corp.’s HD DVD format and instead go exclusively with the rival Sony Corp. technology favored by five major movie studios.

In Mac related gaming news, the fine folks over at MacLife have sit down with Spore creator, Will Wright.  I am looking forward to this release and hope it won’t suck the hours away from my life like some other games.

It looks like there is finally some open source competition to Parallels Desktop and VMWare’s Fusion…innotek GHmB’s VirtualBox has arrived. Considerably smaller in footprint and with a end-user price point that will make the others scramble, VirtualBox provides a low cost alternative to running Windows/Linux virtual machines on your Mac. Ars Technica (Love those guys!) has a good article with some of the current limitations and features detailed.

From the article:

VirtualBox is an excellent alternative the two more well-known options, and for personal use comes in at an unbeatable price: free. With Sun’s Tuesday announcement that they have acquired innotek, the company could suddenly become a force in the Mac VM market.

Since I maintain a Windows XP laptop next to my Mac Pro, I haven’t found a whole lot of use for visualization of this type. However, if you are trying to win a corporate platform battle, this may be one more feather in your cap to prove there is not much downside to running Mac’s…even in the Enterprise.