Last weekend, when I wanted to see more South Park, I made a trip to Best Buy in search of the set containing Volumes 4, 5, and 6. I was unsuccessful. Even since they came out, I have also been keeping my eyes peeled for Farscape Volumes 2 and 3 at every retail outlet I have happened to be at. Also unsuccessful.

Today, I resorted to (the slightly more expensive) Suncoast Video store in the mall, explicitly in search of these items. I was successful on all counts, but they were a couple bucks more than they would have been at Best Buy (if Best Buy would have stocked them). Still, better than buying online and paying shipping charges, and having to wait IMO. An impatient bastard I am, I know.

This evening, I watched all the episodes on the South Park Volume 4 disc, followed by Farscape, Exodus from Genesis. I swear that South Park has got to be the funniest television show ever made. I think it even beats Seinfeld (although that's close). Still, there's some part of me that just has to be shaking his head at how one could sit and laugh endlessly through an episode whose plot revolves around circumcision. Something very perplexing and strange about that. Kyle the Hero. "You stay away from my little brother! You aren't going to cut off his wee-wee! Not today you sick-ass weirdo!" ROTFL.

Farscape, as always, is even more magnificant on DVD than it was via the DivX format. (And 100 times better than the crappy .asf versions with poorly synced audio.) Take note: I am living proof of another real life, concrete example of someone who, through the viewing of "pirated" material, has become interested enough in something to actually spend money on it. Had I not obtained those illegal files, I almost certainly would never have learned about what a great show Farscape is. But do you think the movie companies will ever learn? Of course not.

The 5.1 mix of the musical score on Farscape is just amazing. It's better than many movies do with the sound engineering. Excellent stuff.

...

Alright. It's been a while since we've had one of these, so I am now going to go into a rant mode. An Anti-Microsoft diatribe. Let's do this one in A minor.

With all the hype and hubbub going around lately about Windows XP and Office XP (and others around the office who are less MS-loathing than myself considering upgrades), this little review (mostly positive) linked from my Slashbox caught my eye a few minutes ago.

For the most part, I don't particularly care about how many features were added or not added, because they will have little effect on me. As most regular readers know, there's no way I would put their untrustworthy software on any of my personal hardware no matter how many "innovative" features they add. I also think it's unlikely that there will be a forced edict at work telling everybody to upgrade anytime soon. So what does it matter to me? Not much. But anyway...

There were a couple of choice items in the article I felt were worth commenting on. Here goes.

A nice bit of integration comes with the e-mail document feature. If you want to send someone a document, just click on the e-mail icon and it will fire off the document. If you use Outlook or Outlook Express, it knows all the names in your address book. Only problem is, the document is inserted into the e-mail rather than sent as an attachment.

Oh great. It's obnoxious enough that people send these cumbersome .doc files around as attachments, which requires that you choose between (a) drop everything for a few minutes to load up an all-memory-consuming program capable of displaying the hideous beasts, or (b) decide that whatever is in there is probably not important enough to spend the time and trouble bothering with, and ignore.

But now, Microsoft will be encouraging even worse behavior from its users. Instead of just an ugly attachment, now we'll open an email from someone ignorant enough to use this so-called "feature" (the phrase "other side of the building" comes to mind), and out jumps scads of line noise binary data right in the body of the message! It's really not the fault of the person who uses the feature. They just do it because it's "easy to use". The implementor is the one who did things wrong. What a surprise. Not.

A nice feature in Word 2002 is the Reveal Formatting Task Pane, which shows you all of the information about the text and lets you change the different formats available, rather than constantly going to the pulldown menus.

Having not seen it first hand, I can't be 100% sure, but based on this description, this sounds like one of the best features WordPerfect had over a decade ago! Go Microsoft! Way to innovate. They must think people have short memories, even putting one of the same words in the name. Either that, or it's an intentional attempt at mocking their once-competitor who is now effectively dead. We beat you, and to rub it in, we're now going to spit in your face by imitating what you did. What you had way back then was indeed better, but we'll never admit it openly. "Reveal Formatting" Hah!

If this article is true, this would mean I can no longer use this as my "key" reason for arguing that WordPerfect is better than Word. Somehow, I doubt Microsoft will do as good a job of implementing it as WordPerfect did though. It will likely be some watered down wuss version. But maybe they will prove me wrong. We'll see.

Another article.

I'm going to start part this a little differently. I'm not exactly certain where I'll end up with it, but we shall find out soon enough.

Going back in time to over 5 years ago. The year is 1996. The month is March. Bitscape (before he became known by this handle) is about to undergo what will become one of the most tramatic experiences of his life. He will be institutionalized within weeks, but he has no inkling of it yet.

Having gotten a job at Little Caesar's, and then quitting 4 days later (walked out. no 2 week notice) because the manager wanted him to clock out and then finish up the assigned tasks plus accounting paperwork (which couldn't possibly be done within a work day) after hours. (Something he would later discover was clearly illegal under federal labor laws, but I'm getting off-topic.)

Unemployed again. At home. Writing many a web page rant. Reading emails. Sending emails. Using (please hold your surprise, and your vomit) Windows 95, IE 2.0 for most web surfing, and Outlook Express that shipped with Windows for email.

Where am I going with this? And how is it an anti-Microsoft rant? Well, maybe it isn't. Continuing...

Long story short: As my mental condition degenerated, I became increasingly paranoid. Looney. Frantic. Egomaniacal. Things that I had once thought to be jokes became serious, and vice versa. I took to wandering the steets at night, once walking around town under the stars the entire night until the sun came up over the cold horizon.

(Sidenote: Yes, Requiem for a Dream did remind me of myself on some ways. That's probably partially why I got so freaked out by it. I have been told that manic depression in a manic state is chemically very similar to someone on amphetamines, so it's likely no coincidence that it struck a nerve.)

One evening, while I was typing messages into a web form, things on my computer stopped working the way I thought they should. None of the dialog boxes looked the same. The messages I was submitting weren't getting through. I tried to open my email, but I couldn't get it to connect. The fonts were all different. Everything was strange. Something in there was seriously wrong! (Likely explanation: 95% imagination, 4% hallucination, 1% Windows sucking.)

My paranoid mindset took over. I became certain that Microsoft and Bill Gates had a backdoor straight into my computer, and that they could control (and watch) anything and everything that it did. I realized that they had almost certainly been monitoring my every keystroke for months. I imagined every bit of data sent straight from the undocumented Windows code straight to Redmond via the net. Every message to the mailing list. Every file I had started to write and deleted. Every word uttered to a girl I had met online, corresponded with, and even discovered that she lived not too far away. (Although we never got around to meeting in person. And my being hauled off to the nut house pretty much killed off any further contact.)

I decided it was no longer safe to use the computer, and went around the neighborhood hollaring (literally shouting) about this plot by Bill Gates to screw the world. I could have been a character straight out of an X Files episode teaser. (Although I had not yet discovered the show at that time.)

Someone called the police with a disturbing the peace complaint. They came out and talked to me, convinced me to go back home peacefully, and stay there. (At least for a while.)

I became obsessed with the idea of getting Windows off my computer, and installing this other operating system I had read about called Linux. I had been reading more about it, and decided Slackware would be the one to go with.

I formulated this plan about walking to Boulder, marching into Software Etc in Crossroads, and asking if I could buy a copy of Slackware Linux. (At that time? Fat chance.) If they didn't have it, I would go to another store until I found a place that did.

Needless to say, this plan would never come to fruition. (At least not until many months later.) I was going to go out the next evening, but the taste of mom's spaghetti kept me in the house. (Who may have thought I was acting wierd, but still had no idea just how over the edge I was. I act wierd even when I'm normal, so how could anyone know the difference?)

That night was the last night I would spend at home. I didn't sleep a wink. Stayed up all night, filtering the tv shows through the wierdest perceptive distortions ever (TNG was especially trippy). Rearranged (into shambles) the furniture in my room multiple times. Unplugged all the electronic devices from the wall for fear they would transmit covert data to the conspiracy. Covered the windows. Flashed the lightswitch on and off to try to fool them. Turned the computer back on. And off. Turned on the radio. Played other music over my speakers at the same time. Thought it all sounded absolutely gorgeous. Pushed it up to full blast, and then back down again. Climbed out of the window, crawled out around the ground, hid behind the bushes. Listened intently for engine sounds of the car driving up. Crawled back inside the house. Rearranged things some more. And we're still not even close to daylight yet.

And on it goes. I didn't intend to even go nearly this much into this. This was supposed to be a story leading up to my current distrust of Microsoft.

I did not get Linux installed that day. The next evening, I was locked inside a room far from home, with plain yellow walls, an extremely heavy steel screen between me and the window, a bed bolted to the floor, and a door with a thick glass (or plastic?) window. (That glass, if that was what it is, would not shatter. Very thick stuff. But anyway, I digress again.)

Many months later, I was allowed to go home. I got my job back at the preschool, part time. (They were very kind there.) Although I was way too mentally beat to do it for a while, a few months later, I did obtain and install a Linux cd.

(Doh! I forgot to describe the part where, during a fit of insanity, I threw away my Windows 95 cd, never to be able to retrieve it again. Oh well. Another time, perhaps.)

Although I would later realize that there was no great conspiracy to monitor my every click (or was there? *play spooky horror movie music*), I took a certain comfort in the fact that my OS was fully open source, free from the control of any single corporation. I still do. I trust the diverse band of free software contributors with my key data much than I would trust any corporation, publicly traded or privately owned. So there is still a little part of me that keeps that paranoia. I think that's healthy.

Now, with this development of Microsoft building in functionality to automatically query their server every time Windows is installed (and possibly disable it if you want to change your hardware), it looks like reality may be coming a tiny step closer to my paranoia of yesteryear.

No, it's not something that's going to spy on each user's every click (there's already other software that does that, reportedly used by companies who like to play Big Brother with their employees). But still, software that has to query a central server for authorization every time you want to install is too close for comfort for me. Especially when the exact rules for when it may or may not stop working are never revealed to the user in a clear way.

This makes me very glad that I have kept myself completely free of a dependence on software from that company. Even better, I don't need any proprietary software for critical core functions. I intend to keep it that way.

Another sidenote. Brief. My commentary on this topic wouldn't be complete if I didn't mention something about this. It might make me something of a hypocrite.

I work at a proprietary software company. Not only that, but a company that practices schemes similar to what I have vaguely described above. It is a continuing itch to have to admit to myself that I, personally, would never want to purchase what I am producing for others to purchase. No matter how good a job I and coworkers do, and no matter how technically excellent it is, being on the other end of the bargain would be a Very Bad Place to be. Do unto others...

So why do I keep working there? Usual reasons. Pays a good wage. I like the people I work with. The work itself is (usually) interesting on a technical level, I get to use Linux on the job, and listen to the music. Good benefits. Easy going work environment. etc.

So yeah. I guess that's just sort of an ongoing thing, I guess.

[Bitscape grows sleepier.]

What time is it anyway? Holy fsck! Almost 3. How did this happen? I'm going down for rest.