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You new-school punks and your little white DRM-encumbered mp3 players…

Of all the micro-drive based mp3 players I’ve had, they’ve all either died after one year, died after 3 days and been RMA’d, had a completely unusable UI and had to be given away, or been stolen (and stolen)….except for my beloved Brick.

Yup, manufactured circa February 2000, this baby weighs in at about 2/3 of a pound, pretty much fits in a (very large) cargo-pants pocket, can only transfer at pokey-ass USB1.1 speed, has no backlight and ran a hefty $695 back then. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. YOU GOT THAT?!

This beast, lovingly known as The Brickâ„¢, also sports just about the most intuitive user interface ever conceived, has damn decent battery life (9 hours), and came with the most kick-ass headphones ever made, which I’m still using today — they have melon-pads, hi. The Brick’s only drawback was the measly 6 GB hard drive…until I swapped it out for a 60 GB one last night in a grand total of about 15 minutes (and a cost of about 60 bucks).

Did I mention the thing is basically indestructible? It’s like The Thing, Hulk, Wolverine, and The Quanger all rolled up into one mp3 player, only shaped like SpongeBob.

I’d like to thank this nameless guy for his excellent how-to on replacing the hard drive in a PJB-100. Also, see his PJB resource page, and the ultimate source of information about The Brick.

P.S. If you don’t ph34r m4 1337 Brick, you may find yourself severely pummeled about the head and shoulders by same.

UPDATE: This 60 GB Toshiba does NOT have internal separation of the logic board and hard drive motor power leads, dammit. Which means one would have to perform some delicate surgery: Hardware modifications are scary
I opt just to pop the battery out when not in use–call me teh l4mz0rz.
UPDATE to the UPDATE: I recently purchased another brick through ebay.co.uk from a fine bloke name of Tony Stevens which has had this hardware modification done (or is simply a newer board), so I now have a 60 GB brick with a backlight and I no longer have to pop the battery out. Hooray!

So I just found a site to feed my election poll results habit:

http://www.electionprojection.com/

And a quote from the site highlighting the need to get your ass out and vote in 2 weeks.

What didn’t happen last week has happened this week. For the first time since I began projecting the 2006 mid-term elections, the Democrats are projected to take back the House. Following a slew of district polls highly-favorable to the Democrats, 7 races have flipped to blue over the last week. In truth, these projections more closely reflect the prevailing winds of political punditry we are hearing across the country.

I do think that, barring another October Surprise, we have hit bottom from a Republican perspective. With 19 GOP seats now painted blue and 8 more within 2 points of going to the Democrats, that puts the bottom at 27. Right now, I see that as the maximum number of possible losses the GOP could sustain. (The number could grow by two or three if everything goes right for the Democrats.)

On the other hand, only two GOP seats are projected to be lost by more than 4 points, and only 12 by more than 2 points. Clearly, the fight for the House is up for grabs. The slightest move either way in the coming 22 days will make the difference, hightlighting once again the importance of participation.

It turns out that Chuck Norris sucks and Mr. T truly pwnz.

link from fark, of course

Hilarious commentary by Glen Weldon over at McSweeney’s:

I could command you. You, those Robot Chicken assholes, alla y’all. Command you all to, you know, quit it.

I don’t make, like, a big deal about that, but I could. You’re just a fish at heart, dude. Down deep in your forebrain. I fuckin’ could.

The man who got the whole “Aquaman sucks” ball rolling: Seanbaby’s Aquaman page.

Ever since I joined bookmooch, I’ve been reading more. Thanks to the internet, I now have complete strangers sending me the books I never got around to reading but always meant to. One that I recently finished was George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I read this one a long time ago when I was in my early 20’s and decided to read it again, since everyone’s talking about it for some reason *cough cough* the GOP *cough cough*.

It made a larger impact on me this time around. Maybe because I’m no longer constantly chasing tail and taking drugs. Or maybe age really does bring wisdom. Who knows?

Anyway, about a gajillion words have been written about this book already. I can’t possibly add anything to that discussion. But I can tell you that for all the talk about doublethink, thoughcrime and Big Brother watching us, there is one phrase from that book that had a lot of impact on me, even though I’ve never seen it cited.

“Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

Yes, it is.

Read Nineteen Eighty-Four online here.

Basically it comes down to “there’s no economical gain to be had by invading North Korea (except for that yummy Kim-chee crop) like there is in Iraq, so fuck ‘em, let ‘em have their nukes, who cares if a bunch of fuckin people get vaporized, there’s just no financial incentive for us.” I’m not advocating war (just assassination of one crazy fucked-up-hair-having Egomaniac or two).
link from The Rude Pundit, of course

Posted by one of my homies on myspace.com:

President Bush, First Lady Laura and Dick Cheney were flying on Air Force One. George looked at Laura, chuckled and said, “You know, I could throw a $1,000 bill out of the window right now and make somebody very happy.”

Laura shrugged her shoulders and replied, “I could throw ten $100 bills out of the window and make ten people very happy.”

Cheney added, “That being the case, I could throw one hundred $10 bills out of the window and make a hundred people very happy.”

Hearing their exchange, the pilot rolled his eyes and said to his co-pilot, “Such big-shots back there. Shit, I could throw all of them out of the window and make 56 million people very happy.”

Sheesh I sure hope posting something like this doesn’t get us disappeared….

There is too much at stake in this election. Not only do we have a chance to kick some republicans out of congress, but there are a ton of amendments and referenda to vote for. Here’s a handy guide (for Colorado flatearthers):

There. I’ve done all the hard work for you. Just get a ballot and mail it in or try your luck with one of those newfangled voting machines everyone’s talking about.

I’m looking at you Nad.

Bravo! He says what we’re all feeling.

video

transcript

On first impression, they didn’t really add enough to warrant the ~$19 you can get it for on ebay.  The new scenarios look OK, but we don’t have the major basic gameplay improvements that you saw between Civ III and Civ III:Conquests…of course that’s probably due to the fact that all the Conquests gameplay improvements were incorporated into the original Civ IV.
Disclaimer:  I have yet to get one of them new Great General/Warlord thingies though; will update in comments on that when I do.

Financial Civs still r00lz J00.