Denver @ Buffalo

So some friends and I went to the Denver Broncos @ Buffalo Bills game last week. Whoa was it cold....and fun. We tailgated for 4 hours with the guys from Orangeforce One, and Gotbeer.com. Here are some pic's of the tailgate party and our seats.

Stanley 'Tookie' Williams' Prison Record

Well, I wonder if Snoop Dogg, Mike Farrell, or any other Pinheads investigated this self-proclaimed reformed inmate. This is just part of the violent history of Williams stay at San Quentin. Maybe the energy that Snoop and others have put into his plea for clemency would be better used to continue the message of peace, and consequences for violent actions.

Williams' Violent Acts on Death Row

In response to Stanley 'Tookie' Williams' petition for clemency, the Los Angeles District Attorney's office outlined in its response the following prison discipline record of the notorious founder of the Crips gang.

After being convicted of the four murders and sentenced to death in 1981, Stanley Williams was sent to San Quentin State Prison. Upon arriving at San Quentin, Williams quickly demonstrated violent behavior consistent with a hardened murderer. Although this is not an exhaustive list of Williams' violent acts while in prison, it is illustrative of his behavior at San Quentin:

• During his Trial, he attempted to escape by blowing up a transportation bus, killing 2 guards.
  
• On June 30, 1981, just two months after being sentenced, Williams was involved in a violent fight with another inmate. Williams was observed kneeling over the other inmate and striking him in the head with his closed fists.
  
  
  When Williams was ordered to cease fighting, he ignored the order. Only after repeated orders to stop, did Williams stop his violence. (P. Exh. 6).

• On January 26, 1982, Williams was ordered to lineup for his return to his cell. Williams refused the order and became hostile. The guard then explained the line-up procedure to Williams. Williams responded by saying "you'll get yours boy, I can do anything now because I know what the gunmen will do…one of these days I'll trick you boy." (P. Exh. 7).

• On January 28, 1982, Williams had two separate instances where he threw chemical substances at guards. In one of these instances, Williams threw a chemical substance in the eyes and on the face of a guard. As a result of that assault, the guard suffered from chemical burns to these areas and had to be taken to the hospital where he received emergency care. (P. Exh. 8).

• On January 29, 1982, Williams again attacked a guard by throwing a chemical substance on him. (P. Exh. 9).

• On February 16, 1984, a guard saw Williams bending over another inmate and striking him with his closed fists. In an effort to stop the attack, the guard blew his whistle and drew his weapon. Williams, however, continued to fight. Only after a guard fired a warning shot, did Williams stop fighting. (P. Exh. 10).

• On June 8, 1984, Williams was observed participating in inappropriate behavior with a female visitor. When the guard advised the female of the prison policies, Williams became verbally hostile and stated, "you are looking around too much and that's not your job. I have dusted many officers on the street, one more would not make any difference." (P. Exh. 11).

• On July 4, 1986, Williams stepped between a guard and another inmate and began to beat up the inmate. The guard ordered Williams to stop but Williams continued with the assault. Eventually, after gun officers responded, Williams stopped the attack. (P. Exh. 12).

• On October 10, 1988, Williams was involved in a fight that led to him being stabbed. Prison officials subsequently learned that this stabbing was done in retaliation for a September 22, 1988, stabbing of another inmate ordered by Crips leader Stanley Williams. (P. Exh. 13).

• On October 19, 1988, Williams was placed in Administrative Segregation based on his association with the Crips street gang. (P. Exh. 13).

• On December 24, 1991, Williams was involved in another fight with an inmate. Once again, despite being ordered to stop, Williams continued with the assault. Eventually, gun officers responded by firing a round near Williams. After the shot was fired, guards gained control over Williams. (P. Exh. 14).

• On July 6, 1993, a large fight broke out in the shower area. Williams was one of the combatants. A guard ordered the inmates to stop, but the fight continued. After a warning shot was fired, the fighting stopped. Subsequently, a stabbing instrument ("shank") made of sharpened plastic was recovered from where the fight had occurred. (P. Exh. 15).

Also, Williams continues to refuse to aid law enforcement in the investigations into current gang members, saying that he will never be a "snitch". Wow, Tookie, you sound really reformed there....they have a video in Baltimore for guys like you.
He also still refuses to accept the blame for the 4 murders that were committed with his gun, and he was identified by the witnesses at the scene.

Video Ipod Is Here

via engadget

The iPod (with video) and new iMac G5—hands-on first impressions!

Posted Oct 12, 2005, 3:55 PM ET by Ryan Block

As reported by Engadget correspondent Paul Boutin:

The video iPod won’t disappoint. It feels slim and easy to hold even after two weeks spent with my nano. Video
playback is solid. They’re not kidding about 30 fps without sputtering. You can’t fast forward, but you can scroll back
and forth on a progress bar—just as you do with music—to jump forward and back in the video. Oh, and the black
model is going to be hot. Without the U2 model’s red wheel it’s less of an acquired taste.

The iMac hasn’t changed much. It’s a wee bit thinner and there’s a camera eye / IR detector at the top. The eye is the
one thing that doesn’t live up to Apple’s usual panache. It seems an odd black dot in the middle of the iMac’s white
forehead.

The remote control, which uses IR is very stylish. It has an iPod Shuffle look and feel and a set of controls set in
a circle that resemble the first iPods, but are marked differently. The on-screen menus for Front Row are also
iPod-like. One nice touch is the way Front Row blurs out the menu screen on a DVD (You know: “Operation not permitted”)
and puts a standardized iPod-like menu over it. My one gripe is that it’s not always clear which button to push on the
remote: plus or minus, fast forward or rewind, or something else? The Apple rep told me to press Menu to select the
video player from the main Front Row menu. Whoops - you have to press Play (>). Yes, even six buttons can be
confusing at first—unusual for Apple.

TV shows on the iMac are a grainy 320 x 240 that looks better in a small window than full screen. It’s not a TiVo
replacement, let’s be clear. It’s more like the BitTorrent copies of The Daily Show - a way to catch shows you’d have
to miss otherwise, and definitely more reliable than streaming. It’ll be a good alternative to needing to plop in front
of the boob tube once more shows become available. The iTunes interface is a lot more consumer friendly than finding
and downloading torrents. What it needs most are more shows!

The underrated announcement of the day is iTunes gifting. Those of us who are always evangelizing new bands or
you-gotta-hear-this songs to each other now have an easy way to push tracks on our friends and vice versa. Good thing
the recipient has to accept the gift, or I’d be jamming everyone’s libraries with Goldfrapp already.

BitTorrent Explained

BitTorrent is sort of a download manager.

(Note: The following is intended for newcomers to the mere idea of BitTorrent. See this page for the actual protocol documentation.)

The problem

Imagine this. Everybody wants to download the latest 100MB patch for
Super Game 76. So Super Game 76's makers, Genericasoft, upload
patch on their servers so that all of Super Game 76's 10,000 players
can download it.
But Super Game 76 is insanely popular. This means that in a
relatively short short space of time, Genericasoft's servers are going
to have to provide 10,000 copies of that 100MB file. That's gonna strain
any server, right? Genericasoft runs out of bandwidth, everybody
finds their download to be running horribly slowly (if at all), nobody
gets the patch they need, and it's all bad.
Or maybe your site hosts some cool video - say 10MB - for people to
download, but then suddenly Slashdot links to you or something,
and bam! you have about a hundred thousand people trying to download
the file at once, something your server isn't prepared for, causing
it to nosedive.

The solution

If a hundred thousand people are downloading at once, that's a whole
lot of combined downloading bandwidth. But it's also a whole lot
of combined upload bandwidth... none of which is being used for anything. Can't we use that to our advantage? Yes, we can!

Suppose Genericasoft divides their 100MB patch into, say, four
hundred smaller chunks. Then, to get the whole patch, you just need
to get four hundred chunks instead of one big one. And let's suppose
that when people connect to Genericasoft to get their patch,
they don't download the chunks sequentially... they just get whatever
chunks are available until they have the complete set. And let's
suppose - this is the clever bit - that everybody knows which chunks everybody else has.
Now you connect to a special Genericasoft server called a "tracker".
A tracker is a server dedicated to keeping track of which chunks
everybody has, and keeping everybody up to date. So Genericasoft's
tracker says to you "Right, I've got all four hundred chunks. Person A
over there has chunks 2 and 3 only. Person B has all four hundred
chunks. Person C just has chunks 1 to 100. Person D..." until it's told
you who has what chunks available. Then, and this is the really clever bit, instead of getting all four hundred chunks from Genericasoft, you get each chunk from whoever happens to have it available. You could get chunk 1 from person C, chunks 2 and 3 from person A, chunk
4 from Genericasoft itself, or whatever. The point is, you don't get all the chunks from Genericasoft. The majority of them, you get from other people who are also downloading at the same time as you are.
The clear advantage here is that Genericasoft saves an awful lot of
bandwidth. Since you can download many chunks at once, it also
means you can download as fast as your personal internet connection can
manage - you aren't limited by whatever connection speed Genericasoft
is stuck with.

How to use BitTorrent

The above concepts were - as far as I am aware - invented by Bram
Cohen. He named the protocol "BitTorrent", and also came up with the first BitTorrent computer program ("client").
Once you have your client installed, you go to Genericasoft's
website. Genericasoft will have set up a small file, of the order
of a few dozen kilobytes, called a "torrent", freely available for
anybody to download. It'll be called something like
"sg76patch.torrent". Instead of downloading the 100MB patch, you download this relatively
tiny file instead. The torrent contains all the information about the
patch that your client needs to download it: the name and location of
the tracker that it needs to connect to, the name of the file it's
downloading, the size of the chunks it's been split up into, what order
they go in... stuff like that.

Then you double-click on it to open it. .txt files open in Notepad.
.doc files open in Word. .torrent files open in BitTorrent! Your
BitTorrent client will open up, ask you to select a location to save
the patch, and whizz away, finding chunks and downloading them until it's got all four hundred (or whatever. The number of chunks can vary hugely). As with KaZaA, Direct Connect and so on, all this downloading can be done in the background while you do other things, and could take any amount of time, depending on the size of the patch, how much bandwidth you have, and how many other people are also downloading it at the same time as you. When it's done, it'll
stitch the chunks back together and say "I'm done!" Then you can close
BitTorrent and get on with installing your patch.
Note that BitTorrent is not in any sense searchable, like KaZaA or
eMule or a Direct Connect hub. You can't just run it and type "Super
Game 76" to find the patch you're after. Instead, you have to go out
there on the big wide internet and find the torrent you're after
manually.

BitTorrent etiquette

As you may have figured out, if you are downloading chunks from
other people using BitTorrent, then they must be uploading chunks to
you. Similarly, other people will be downloading chunks from you. If you are downloading, you must upload! Otherwise, the entire exercise is pointless, and Genericasoft might as well serve every patch individually all on their own. All BitTorrent clients will force you
to upload as well as download. Most of them will also keep a record of
how much you've uploaded compared to how much you've downloaded (your
share ratio). Ideally, to keep the universe in karmic balance as it
were (and to preserve the BitTorrent network), you should upload as
much as you download; i.e. your share ratio should ultimately be 1.00
or higher.
People who have all of the chunks no longer need to download
anything, so they can quit out. However, you can leave BitTorrent open
and stick around anyway, letting people download anything they need from you. If
you do this you are called a "seed". Without at least one seed, it
should be obvious that any BitTorrent network will collapse, because sooner or
later there will be a chunk which nobody
has, meaning nobody can finish their download. In this example, Genericasoft's server would
probably be a seed, but if you're feeling nice, you can seed too. The
chances are that when your download has finished, your share ratio will
be less than 1.00 anyway, so in this case you should seed until you
reach 1.00 anyway.
Not that there's any reason you should stop there. In fact, you're
entirely free to keep seeding for as long as you like. You can even
open up the torrent again at a later date, after you're all done, and just
do a little more seeding on general principle.

Different BitTorrent clients

Cohen's original client is very
simplistic. However, it's short on features. Fortunately, BitTorrent is
an open-source program, meaning that any programmer can take a look at
Cohen's code, and add bells and whistles of his own. This has resulted
in a bundle of other BitTorrent clients being made independently. My
preferred client is Azureus, which is much more powerful and versatile than the original BitTorrent client. It allows you to run several torrents at once, throttle them to
different levels, set priorities on them, and even create your own torrents.
There are many more out there though.

How the illegal downloading scene works

We've established that BitTorrent is a good way to get content to
lots of people in a short space of time without expending huge amounts
of bandwidth. What we also find is that BitTorrent is a great way to
distribute copyrighted material.
It works like this. Instead of it being something legal (a game
patch or the latest Linux distribution), the file being distributed can
easily be illegal, or at least of dubious legality (an album (you can distribute
many files at once using the same torrent), the CD or DVD images of a
new game, a movie, a piece of software or the latest episode of a TV show).
And instead of somebody reputable like Genericasoft or a Linux
developer group, the person who makes and distributes the relevant
torrent and maintains the tracker can be anybody. There are in fact a
bundle of groups of individuals which churn out tonnes of these torrents.
Distributing the torrents for these movies/games/videos becomes a little more complicated as, while technically a site providing torrents isn't directly providing any copyrighted material, it is still legally very dodgy ground. There are a whole bunch of sites dedicated to
circulating these torrents, but finding them isn't trivial.

Pros and cons of BitTorrent compared to other P2P applications

BitTorrent is best consumed as part of a balanced diet of P2P apps
because, like all P2P apps, it has both strengths and weaknesses.

Pros:

• No leeching is permitted. Yes, this IS a pro if you think about it.


• Alleviates server strain as described above.


• Unlike
  KaZaA, there's no underlying network of nodes or servers which can be
  shut down. As long as torrents are made and distributed, and trackers
  remain online, BitTorrent will continue to run.


• BitTorrent is totally free. It does not and never will contain adverts.
  


• BitTorrent is open-source. Anybody can make a BitTorrent client with whatever features he wants.
• No spyware, adware, malware, popups, or other undesirables are bundled with it.

Cons:

• No leeching is permitted. You have to upload as well as
  download. All BitTorrent clients which allow throttling will adjust
  your download throttle to match your upload throttle: if you're not
  letting people download from you then you won't be allowed to download
  from them.


• Not searchable. Big sites full of torrents are easy to find, but no single
  site carries all the torrents; if you're looking for something obscure
  then you may have to look a long way.


• BitTorrent is good for downloading stuff which is popular now,
  because the number of seeds and peers will be large. Old, obscure and
  non-mainstream material, on the other hand, is difficult to find.
  Looking for an album that's at number one in the charts right now? No
  problem. Searching for an obscure EP from 1998? Even if you manage to
  find a torrent, it's entirely possible that the tracker might have been
  taken offline, or that there are no seeds, leaving you up the creek.
  


• BitTorrent is totally public and hence insecure. While nobody can use it to send
  you viruses or anything like that, your IP address is visible to
  everybody else using the torrent. If you're using BitTorrent, you can
  be tracked down easily.

Kanye West speaks like a slow kid

You spend one labor day weekend selling everything you own to donate to charity and you miss all the hilarious things that are going on with celebrities. The biggest story so far is Kanye West's comments during last Friday's A Concert for Hurricane Relief telethon, where he ignored the teleprompter and went off on a confusing rant about being a hypocrite, ending the segment saying, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." While hilarious in its own right, the combination of Mike Meyers' reaction along with NBC's desperate cutaway to Chris Tucker zoning out make it the feel good film of the year. Anways, both the American Red Cross and NBC have released statements trying to distance themselves from Kanye, which is a smart move because that brother is all sorts of crazy. Watch the amazingly awesome video here!

Wolf Blitzer Concerned ablout shade of Katrina victims

From CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, Thursday, September 1, 2005, covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

BLITZER: "You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, as Jack Cafferty just pointed out, so tragically, so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold."

"And they are so black"?? What is that supposed to mean? Can you imagine if Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity had said this? There would be cries of "outrage" and breathless demands for an apology.
Hear it for yourself HERE.

Firefox Browser Hacking

Ok, its no secret..Firefox is my favorite browser.. infact, if you are not using it (for example using... Gasp, IE) you need to change. Well I decided to write an article on how to "hack" Firefox to make it even better. Using a few tweaks here and there, we can make FireFox considerably faster, enable advanced tab options, make newer versions compatible with older extentions, run directly from a flash disk, and on and on.

First, Lets change some hidden options to make it faster...
1. Open Firefox 1.0 and in the address bar type: about:config 1. Find browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs and double click on it so it = true
2. Find network.http.pipelining and double click on it so it = true
3. Find network.http.pipelining.maxrequests double click on it and change it from 4 to 100

What do these changes do?
1. Then enables advanced tab options in your Tools/Options page
2. This enables option #3.
3. This makes FF use 8 threads to each page.. Bascially, if you thought FF was fast before, try it after this.

Second, lets make it look better...Visit the Mozilla Firefox theme page and select a theme that looks good to you.I personally like the Noia eXtreme skin, but choose one that looks good to you.
Now lets make it work FOR us...
One of the sweetest things about Firefox is the ability to use extentions. At the time of this writing, there are 226 extentions that we can use to make it better.. I will only touch on a few of them that I use. (Alphabetically Sorted)Adblock: Remove inline ads. BugmeNot; Fills in those annoying password fields at places like NYPost.com with passwords already submitted by other users so you dont have to register. Bookmarks Synchronizer: Save your bookmarks to an XML file, and sync with an FTP server. Keep your work/home bookmarks current!Digger: Navigate to parent directories, switch to ftp equivalent of site, climb subdomains, etc.. Very helpful in "scouting" a site.Download Sort: Automatically send downloads to specific folders based on file's extention.Gmail Notifier: Lets you know if you have new gmailGoogle Pagerank Status: Lets you see the Google PageRank of the page you are visiting.refspoof: "Spoof" your referer.Spiderzilla: Download an entire site to a local directory.Super DragAndGo: Drag a link to blank space on a webpage, and it will open it in a new tab.SwitchProxy: Manage and switch between multiple proxies. Make sure to read my article on finding and useing proxies.User Agent Switcher: Switch the user agent of your browser.MouseGestures:This is the "Mouse Gestures" firefox extension. Basically, to go forward you draw a line from left to right while holding down the mouse button, to go back you draw a line from right to left while holding down, to close draw a L, to open a new page, from bottom to top - there are other options such as switch tabs, source, view cookies, etc. I have personally found this to make my browsing experience much easier and much more reflexive (I don't think about pressing the back button, so much as automatically drawing it); when I use internet explorer oftentimes I right click by accident.x: Gives a Toolbar "paranoia" button, click it and it can clear history, form info, saved passwords, download history, cookies, & cache.

Firefox on a USB ThumbdriveCheck out the article on Portable Firefox 1.0Tell Firefox what we want to see (and what we don't)Sick of Google Ads on everyone's page? Well lets tell firefox that we don't want to see them anymore. This hack will remove 95% of all Ads, including google Ads. (Yes, even from Gmail. Warning, Removing these ads may violate the TOS of Gmail)This hack uses the magic of CSS and a Firefox configuration file named UserContent.css. We are going to edit this file, I suggest you download the plugin ChomEdit to make your job easier. (Go install it now & come back after restart)Ok, now that you have ChromEdit installed, open Firefox and click on Tools / Edit User files. A new window will appear that has five tabs across the top. Click on the tab that is labeled userContent.css. Next click on the link below and copy all the text. Then paste it into the userContent.css file, then click the Save button.Code Now restart your browser.. Tada, Google ads are gone!From Digital Media Minute:The above rules make use of the *!important* property value to override any rules that may already exist within the page that is being loaded. In the first rule, GMail has an element with an id of rh and we are setting the tables that have a class equal to metatable within that element, to not display (ie . display:none) A word of caution, we are only hiding the ads from displaying. They are actually still there, just not visible. This means that Google is still indexing your email messages to provide you with “targetted ads”. It is also worth noting that as this hack is based upon creating CSS rules for existing GMail code, it is very possible that this hack will break as GMail continues to evolve.

Kevin Federline Gets A Job!!

After nearly a year of marriage, Kevin Federline has finally found
a job as a temp instructor at Darrin Henson's dance school in Los
Angeles. He's not fooling anybody with his "dancing credentials"
though. I've watched So You Think You Can Dance so I know
that if he's a real dancer he has to be a flaming homosexual who wears
unbuttoned see-through shirts. So either he's not really a dancer and
shouldn't be teaching, or he's incredibly gay and his marriage to
Britney is a hoax. Either way, he should quit his job and focus on
trimming the pubic hair off his face. Or leave it, and get a new job as
Pube-Face: The man with a face full of pubic hair.p>

Free Laptop Link

I have recieved a video ipod, PSP, and MAc Mini from this company. If you need proof I can send you pictures.
Proof at: Wired News

So, all you need to do is:

1)sign up here.

You can choose between:
Apple iBook
Gateway NX550
Hp nx6110
Sony VAIO VGN-FS790B01
Toshiba Satellite M45-S169

You must complete one of the offers


Thanks again for participating.

Got My Freepsp!!

Ok, so a while back I joined the freepsps.com site to see if I could get one for free like they say you can. Low and BEHOLD....it came, i paid nothing for it, not even shipping. If you havent heard, you just have to sign up and complete one of the free offers (most of which are trial memberships to netflix, blockbuster, napster, etc.) Many of them will cost you absolutely nothing. Then you get a number of friends (5 for a psp, 10 for the Mac Mini), and when they all complete offers, you get your prize, free!! I am trying to get a Mac Mini now....help me out by signing up here. I am also working on a free xbox360, get yours here!