your tax dollars at work

I think the corpulent pill-popper has opened a can of whoop-ass he shoulda left alone. General Clark is after him.

Take Action: Tell Congress to Dump Rush:

Today, I am asking you to join 394 other Americans and email Congress urging them to take Rush Limbaugh off Armed Forces Radio.

Last week, Rush Limbaugh labeled American servicemembers who support an end to the war in Iraq “phony soldiers.”

We’re going directly to Congress to take him off the Armed Forces Radio airwaves. Elected officials in Congress have the power to prevent Limbaugh from using taxpayers’ money to disrespect and censure the voices of our soldiers.

Join us and hold Rush Limbaugh accountable for his offensive and outrageous comments — tell your member of Congress to Dump Rush From Armed Forces Radio today!

Go send in your comments.

weirdness on the web

A significant spike in web traffic today, a lot of it down to these requests (the URI is good so why the 404?)

61.175.139.6 – – [02/Oct/2007:00:44:59 -0700] “GET /wordpress/index.php/archives/2005/04/11/your-wish-is-my-command/#comment-332774 HTTP/1.1” 404 32880 “http://www.paulbeard.org/wordpress/index.php/archives/2005/04/11/your-wish-is-my-command/” “Opera/7.02 Bork-edition (Windows NT 5.0; U) [en]”

and these, like 9000 of them from some rogue web crawler.

75.126.214.21 – – [02/Oct/2007:18:35:14 -0700] “GET /wordpress/index.php/page/54/ HTTP/1.1” 200 40581 “-” “Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.0.1”

Annoyances. I don’t get the first one at all. And I don’t get why I have 12,000 lines of data but can only get less than 200 to be recognized by this regexp:

ARGF.each_line do |line|
if line =~ %r{GET ([^ .]+) }
puts $1
counts[$1] += 1
end
end

links for 2007-10-02

camera testing

I have a multiple day camping trip planned with my fifth grader and 40+ others, and was considering renting a DSLR to document the whole thing, maybe make a little keepsake book from it. But the best price I saw today to rent a Nikon D50 was $60/day. It wouldn’t take too many days renting before buying makes sense. I’m really looking forward to doing this but not too thrilled about messing with film and scanning it all when I get back. I’ll take a lot of pictures or very few (and miss out), depending on how well-equipped I am.

A little more research is in order, it seems.

will this make “albums” worth buying?

is this the new business model?

Radiohead has a new album coming out called In Rainbows. It’s only available from their site for now, either as a download (released Oct 10) or as a “discbox” that includes the CD, a bonus CD, two records, and assorted photos, books, etc. (released Dec 3). (via rex)

(link)

So the folks who want to buy the sounds can do that, those who want a physical doo-dad can buy one and those fans who want the extra stuff can buy that, too.

To tell the truth, I’m torn. I’d like to hear the stuff when it comes out, but I also think as an experiment, the idea of music+other goodies is interesting. Some people will vote more than once . . . .

The Big Deal about this is that the digital download has no fixed price: you pay what you like. The discbox, on the other hand, weighs in at £40, more than US$80, at present.

So what’s it worth? iTunes would charge US$9.99, AMZNmp3 the same, I expect. It will be interesting to see how many orders they take, in advance of release (Oct 10) and how many afterwards.