Another long overdue update, but life gets busy from time to time. Behind that cut-tag below is a fairly boring account of the last two weeks, but if you’re interested.
Tag: music
A list has been circulating the internet from ClearChannel, a conglomerate which owns more than 1700 radio stations, of songs with “questionable lyrics or content” that should not be played. The list can be found here: http://www.hitsdailydouble.com/news/songs.html (Thanks duality).
Now, this isn’t censorship, but it is stupid. Some of the songs suggested are at least reasonably defensible as “in poor taste” given the moment, but some of the songs on the list are inspirational: The Youngbloods “Get Together”, for instance.
The songs I find most amusingly offensive to suggest banning are the two Cat Stevens songs. “Peace Train” and “Morning is Broken”. Why? Because Stevens converted to Islam? (And no, he did not advocate support for the death sentence against Salman Rushdie, either, but that’s another rant…). Frankly, I think songs like “Get Together” and “Peace Train” are JUST what we need.
Anyway, my reason for even bringing this up is ClearChannel is now saying that this was a memo sent from one station manager on an internal mailing list nd was not a company edict. The story is in the San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-000056553jul10.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Ds
Now here’s a fun can of worms. You own a satellite, which is in orbit. It’s out somewhere over the equator somewhere, and nowhere near where you actually have your business offices located. But the country decided that hey, you’re here, and it’s worth X million dollars, so let’s charge property taxes on it as if it were here where your office is.
I’m not sure what to think of this. What happens when a company has multiple headquarters? Who’s liable for the tax then? If I have an office in Gwinnett Co and another in Fulton, I don’t owe Gwinnett Co. property taxes on my office in Fulton. So it seems to me that the taxes on the satellite are owned to whoever has jurisdiction over County Space.
But hey, anything for an extra buck.
Life for me can get very, very busy.
Monday was a good day. My birthday, hurrah, and all that. I went into work, because I’m taking most of the week of July 4th to go and visit my sister-by-choice (more on that later), her husband, and their daughter, in their new home in Knoxville, TN. They’re wonderful people, and we don’t visit them often enough, so I’m really looking forward to the trip.
Monday evening deidrecorwyn and I went out to dinner with telynor and her husband. deidrecorwyn wanted to go to a sushi place, and telynor knows where all the good sushi places are, so I said sure, as long as they serve actual food there as well. I don’t get along well with the idea of sushi. I don’t mind that other people eat it, but it’s just not really my idea of a good time. Fortunately, this place also had excellent teriyaki. I had teriyaki beef and shrimp fried rice, and deidrecorwyn had this massive sushi platter that could feed three people, from the look of it. Ah, sweet decadence. She took about half of it home with her for lunch the next day.
Tuesday I went and got my hair cut. Nothing drastic, just thinned a bit and trimmed so I look less like a wildman come down from the mountain. I’m trying to get the sides to grow out the same length as the back. We’ll see how that goes. Long ago, someone said “Oh, I know just what to do wit your hair”, and it’s never quite recovered. I suppose I really should just have it all chopped off and let it grow back, but I’ve never quite had the gumption to do so.
Wednesday was a long day. One of our core servers at work had a pair of software RAID-5 disk arrays from back when you actually made 20GB disks out of 12 2GB disks. I’d argued successfully that once these disks started to go bad, it’d be nearly impossible to replace or repair them, and that we really should be using hardware RAID devices anyway. So having acquired the hardware for this task, I’d been slowly moving files from the old devices to the new one. I was down at last to the directories that couldn’t easily be moved while the machine was up and running. I got to work at 3am, brought that machine down into single-user mode, and moved that last bit, which took about an hour, all told. Then, since I had to leave early that day for a doctors appointment, I just stayed at work. I slipped out at 7am for breakfast, and just worked until 4pm, after which I went to my doctor’s appointment and then came home and crashed.
Today was dull. After work I dropped by Borders and Barnes & Nobles in search of Tove Janssen books. I heard yesterday that she had passed away, and i realized that I had LOVED the Moomin books when I was a child, and that I no longer had any copies of them. I did manage to find one (Finn Family Moomintroll), as well as a Rocky and Bullwinkle book in the bargain books section. Borders is apparently having a blowout clearance sale, and I found a Stan Rogers CD I didn’t have (Between the Breaks Live) for 75% off. Sometimes the good guys win, eh? 🙂
And that’s the news. I’ll try and actually keep up from now on.