If I had XM, I’d switch to Sirius for this reason alone:

In early September, Sirius Satellite Radio kicked The Word Network off the air — for good. In the meantime, Sirius is adding programming that insults the values of The Word Network and our millions of listeners.
– from Save The Word Network.

I’m religious, but I’m not Christian and I’m just a wee bit tired of some of them. If you know what I mean.

If you’re ever interested in joining the Science Fiction Book Club – the only book club I’ve ever belonged to that sends me selections I actually read – please let me know, because if you join through me I get a free book.

Seriously.

And free books are so good. Especially with summer ending and reading season upon us.

More cute Google goodness: Google Reader. It’s in beta, of course.

In which I discover I hadn’t moved my old old blog folder over to the new server.

Gregg tagged me with a ‘meme’. I forgive him because not only does he have three G’s in his first name, but he’s also a man who isn’t gay and yet still occasionally comments on my blog. (My small straight male readership is loyal, but chatty they’re not.)

Anyway, onto the meme:

1. Delve into your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions. Ponder it for meaning, subtext or hidden agendas.
5. Tag five people to do the same.

My 23rd post is about the weather, snow actually. The sentence is, “You’re still coming down, aren’t you!”

It’s not really my 23rd post. I mean, I couldn’t even find my actual 23rd blog post, since I wasn’t even using a CMS back then. Actually, my only remaining original 23rd blog post is here, and it says, “06.18.00 I love my device. I love AvantGo.com. I love Peek-A-Book!” That was not my first 23rd blog post, however, because that was posted on my long-defunct first web site, http://www.liscoplus.com/mush, which is totally gone forever.

As for meaning, subtext or hidden agenda? Well, it could easily be a metaphor for my crumbling social life, as in, You’re still coming down, aren’t you! I mean, you’re still coming over to my house? We’re going to hang out, right? Right?

Ah, the joys of country living.

Anyway, don’t worry, I’m not going to tag anyone. Do it if you want, don’t if you don’t. (But if you do, link back or I’ll cry.)

Japanese music industry calls for an ‘iPod tax’:

The industry has asked the Japanese government to charge a royalty, to be added to the retail price of portable digital music players like Apple’s iPod, which has been explosively popular here. Money earned from the fee, likely to be 2 percent to 5 percent of the retail price, would go to recording companies, songwriters and artists as compensation for lost revenue from home copying.

Compensation? Lost revenue? Apparently the music industry now believes that copying my CDs onto another device – say, my iPod – constitutes lost revenue? In which alternate universe does this even make sense? When I buy a CD, I own it and can listen to it in any format I want to.

“Recording industries on both sides of the Pacific are trying to find all kinds of schemes to make more money,” said Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, a consulting firm in Campbell, California. “They have this alternative commercial channel, and they’re just trying to block it or tax it.”

One of my favorite programs of all time, meaning I’ve run it on absolutely every Windows box I’ve ever had access to since ’98 came out (which is a lot of boxen), is TClock.

It’s a free little program that replaces your taskbar clock and, among other things, displays the day and date next to the time. You can enter an NTP server and it will automatically sync your system time with an atomic clock, which is, you’ve got to admit, way cool.

It also lets you skin your Start button and the Start menu banner, manage your open windows, play alarms or hourly chimes, do some basic Windows tasks (like shut down your system by double-clicking on it), and more.

But basically I’ve been using it for so long that I feel weird on a system that doesn’t have the date in the lower right-hand corner. I just can’t train myself to quit glancing there for the date.

In which I’m link-happy.

Today, I worked on the site a little. I think it’s officially completely moved now – I got my dad’s blog all snuggled in, and I fixed the problems with my Gallery so it works now, and I even imported some older images.

The farm looks so cool on film. And looking at this old gallery made me remember how excited and geeked out we were during our first winter there… in spite of the time the power to the well pump went out, or the first flood, or the time the roof leaked and did a bunch of damage to the walls. (We call such experiences “the joy of home ownership,” yo.) You wouldn’t believe the amount of shit that went wrong the first year we lived there!

And look, that face on the left? Shiva, when he was tiny and small. And again, as a teenager. Such a handsome dog.

I also made a new theme for this here blog, to go with the weather. The image is about a year old; it’s our barn in front of a weather front. Nice, eh?

In which I saw dawn this morning, and hated it.

I, life-long night person, am on Brett’s schedule.

*shudder*

Last night I went to bed at 8:30, and I got up this morning at 5:30! HOW GROSS IS THAT??!??!?!?

Hopefully it won’t last.

In which I bemoan the loss of my twenty-something body… even though it’s been gone for, like, seventeen years.

God, I hate exercising. I don’t think I make the right endorphins. People are always going on about how they ‘feel so good’ after working out. It makes me sick because I feel nothing but tired and pissed off. A few years ago I took the most brilliant low-impact step aerobics class at the rec center, and even that just made me feel sweaty and agro.

I don’t mind walking twenty blocks to get somewhere, but any codified exercise activity just makes me mad.

Today for lunch, while watching a Tivo’ed episode of Sex and the City (oh Manhattan!), I ate three ounces of brie and an entire avocado in the form of a sourdough sandwich that also contained mayo and tomato.

Do you suppose these things are why I’m thirty pounds into territory that can only charitably be called ‘cuddly’?

Nah.

I think I want a new Pocket PC instead of an iPod nano for my b-day.

The geek in me is tempted to get a Sharp Zaurus simply because it runs a Linux shell, but the penny pincher in me thinks of all the software I’ve purchased over the years for WinCE and Pocket PC 2002, none of which would run on a Zaurus.

I think I’m interested in an iPaq RX3115. They run about $200-$250 on eBay and the reviews I glanced at were good. Plus it’s wireless, and runs Mobile 2003, and I liked my last iPaq.

My old Toshiba PPC is getting ready to retire. It still works, but due to button stickiness I’ve had to reprogram it to use non-sticky buttons for various functions, and it glitches out pretty frequently.