Random thoughts—in blog form!

I decided not to bother with a “how I spent my weekend” post. Not much exciting happened, I just had a restful few days off. (Monday was a holiday in Canada, for any American readers I might have.) I guess most other people had a boring weekend, too, because when I made the rounds this morning of blogs I read regularly, few of them really had much to say.

I had been hoping against hope that I wouldn’t have to buy a bunch of accessories, to go with my “free” camcorder. However, the one thing I really needed was a FireWire card for my computer, because USB—even USB 2.0—really isn’t good enough for transferring video from a camcorder to the computer. However, I was lucky, in the sense that my computer doesn’t have a USB 2.0 bus; it only had USB 1.1. So I was able to get a combo card, that has FireWire and USB 2.0, and I was able to fool myself that I wasn’t just getting the card for my camcorder; I was also getting it for my USB devices. (USB drives, in particular, because every time I stick a USB drive in my computer, it always tells me that it could perform faster. Andrea also has an iPod, which performs better with USB 2.0.)

I finally saw The Corporation yesterday. A great documentary! I’m thinking about getting it on DVD. When I went to the website, they said that there are over 8 hours of extras included. That’s a lot of extras. I’m not sure if that encourages me to get it, or discourages me… Anyway, I highly recommend the film to anyone who gets a chance to see it. I know a lot of people shy away from documentaries, because they’d rather be entertained, but a good documentary—like this one—is entertaining as well as enlightening, so I’m sure you’ll enjoy the movie. (You may, however come away from it angry.)

While I was following links in Wikipedia, I came across the following, which I thought was humourous:

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

You might not find it quite so funny, which is understandable. I don’t know why it tickled my fancy. It just did.

Incidentally, speaking of Wikipedia, Stephen Colbert fans might be amused to note that Wikipedia locked down all elephant-related articles, after he suggested that his viewers go there and update the articles to mention that the number of elephants has tripled in the last decade. (Or whatever it was that he said; I don’t really remember.) I read some of the comments on Wikipedia, and was amused at some of the discussions that took place. Most of the talk was about whether they should have used “full protection”, or whether “semi-protection” might have been enough. (I don’t know what those terms mean, but I’m assuming they’re self-explanatory.) The exchange which amused me most was this one:

I must state for the record that even though I am a well-established Wikipedian who is completely against vandalism of any sort, I would have made an exception in this case and vandalized. So it was probably a good idea to go for the full-protection. I must do what Colbert tells me. (Sorry) K-UNIT 05:01, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

It is unacceptable that a user with something like (it appears) 700 edits would do such a thing. Especially a user that considers themselves to be part of the "Counter Vandalism Unit." It looks bad for the public and it is a disgrace for dedicated contributors like myself. If you wanted to do it, fine, we reverted it, but saying you did such on this talk page angers me. Admins, consider blocking the editing capacity of User:Tkevin1 for the time being. Thank you. --Nick Catalano 10:01, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Heh. Wikipedia nerds.