Dujodu Blog

I haven’t updated in awhile, I’ve been really busy. First with school ending and then the holiday marathon, which in my family is like a never ending party until new years. There is always at least one christmas party somewhere to be going to, it’s pretty insane.

Anyway, I was trying to think of something to blog about and then I realized that I never linked/mentioned Democracy Now! I’m sure you’ve probably heard about it before plenty of times, but what I’m specifically talking about is their daily show that I’ve been watching for the past month or so. I would highly recommend watching it if you have the time (approximately 1 hour/day). They cover a lot of international news (and national news for that matter) that never shows up on the major news networks here. There are tons of options for watching/listening to it, so I’ll go through a few of them. It’s mainly a radio show, so if you can find a station in your area then that is debatably the easiest way to (literally) tune in. They do apparently air it on some TV stations as well. If that isn’t an option or you missed an episode, then you can listen to the show streaming or a grab a copy in mp3 format from the democracy now website using real alternative (or real player, I guess), winamp, itunes, etc. The advantage of using the website over the radio is that you can watch the video, albeit a very low quality video. My favorite way to watch democracy now though is by using bittorrent, which is a kind of p2p app which allows for fast distribution of files, but I’m not going to get into that. If you have bittorrent and a broadband connection I suggest watching the show this way, new episodes are well seeded and you can grab the last 3 that “aired” from the democracy now website. If you want past episodes in high quality you can check out chomskytorrents.org since they are seeded there is well, but they loose seeds fast since it is a daily event. So if you DO want to view a really old episode in high quality, you don’t know how to use bittorrent, or you want to use a chunk of an episode you saw for whatever reason, they are all archived at archive.org in multiple formats ranging from streaming mpeg4 to DVD compatible MPEG2, which is pretty fricken insane. So there you have it, tons of different ways to watch/listen to the show. Now you have no excuse, so go check it out!

Although it doesn’t accurately represent the majority of the episodes, I recommend the one from Monday, December 6th (archive.org, torrent, streaming from website). It’s a great episode and it features various people reading from Howard Zinn’s book “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

Do you hate intrusive software? You know, the type of stuff that takes over all of your file associations while installing them if you don’t carefully read through each dialog? Well I do too, and that’s why I hate Real Player. First of all, it’s a really crappy format to begin with. At first it was ok, everyone was on dial-up and the small file sizes with crappy audio/video were acceptable. However, there are much better options available now with comparable file sizes and superior image and sound quality. Instead of dying out and giving up though, the people at real player just keep coming out with crappy version after crappy version of ad infested software. Thankfully, there is a REAL alternative to real player! This allows you to view real media files without having to install real player on your machine, for those times when real media format is your only option. It also works as a plug-in for Firefox, and it won’t try to run every time you boot or steal your file associations for avi and mpeg files which has nothing to do with real media. You can grab the installer from one of these mirrors.

While I’m at it I should also take some time to promote VLC which Eric told me about like a year ago. It’s a great light-weight video player which is a good alternative to windows media player. It can play pretty much any type of file you throw at it, maybe someday it will also become a real player alternative! You can get a windows version here.

I went to a web development meetup last week and it was pretty cool. If anyone actually reads this and is interested in web development, you can check out its page at meetup.com (which is a pretty evil website, but that’s where the group started). They used to be free, but now they charge like $20 / month, which is a total rip off unless you have a big enough group for everyone to chip in. My friend Martin (AKA Rich Greenfield) told me about it and was able to give me a ride home because I am a carless bum. Martin has a one man improv show, he performs as “Rich Greenfield” and he has some videos up on video.google.com if you want to check them out. This Martin fellow kept raving about this “rooibos” that is similar to tea, but without caffine. I decided I would give it a try, it’s a South African “tea” (it’s not really tea, but most people call it tea or red tea or red bush tea). I got some really cheap bags of it just to try it out while I wait for a shipment of genmai cha, and I must say that it is pretty awesome. It tastes like it would really kick ass iced, so I’ll be sure to try that out. Anyway, the web meetup was at a pretty cool multimedia place downtown called bytestudios. One of the guys there had an amazing screensaver (yes, I realize how insanely geeky that sounds) so I downloaded it immediately when I got home to replace some default lame-o Windows XP screensaver. The screensaver is called “Electric Sheep” and is named after the book “Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep” by Philip K. Dick, which I haven’t read. The cool thing about the screensaver is that it’s ever evoloving, and it’s pretty fun to watch how it changes. I’m not exactly sure how it works, I THINK that while it is running you and everyone else running the screensaver are helping to render the movies that the screensaver plays. The longer you use it, the more complex and flowing the screensaver gets. It uses random seeds based on your hardware configuration to morph the sheep (that’s what they seperate videos are called), and you can use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to rate the sheep. If you are using a boring screensaver, I suggest giving it a try. View more for some screengrabs of it in action, the variations are ridiculous though, so they don’t really represent the real thing. (edit: for a better explination of what the screen saver does, check out this tour from the website or this 5 page PDF)
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Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

These videos are just too sad, but if you haven’t seen them you should.

• Imagine
• Working Class Hero
• Happy X-Mas (War Is Over)
• Give Peace A Chance

If you haven’t seen “The Corporation” you should. It’s an awesome documentary about… corporations! Right now it seems to be on http://www.video.google.com/ for some reason in it’s entirety, so if you want to check it out (albeit in low quality) you can at least get a preview of it there. It would probably be better to just rent it, buy it, or obtain it somewhere else though.

I was watching this on C-SPAN2 today and it was pretty interesting. They had a panel of hurricane Katrina evacuees talking about the conditions before and after the hurricane. All of them had horror stories about the evacuation and recovery, people herded by gunpoint to what they described as “concentration camps.” What really caught my attention though was the serious discussion that took place about the possibility that the levee was intentionally breached to minimize damage to the upper class areas of New Orleans. The panel cited “earwitness” reports that people heard explosions, as well as divers finding craters underwater at the foot of the levees where they were breached. The committee actually had a discussion about the possibility and agreed to investigate, the evacuees requested that it be done by an independent source and even offered to fund it but were turned down. Either way, there is apparently going to be an investigation. I don’t know if we’ll ever hear about it of if it will make any sort of national news, but I thought it was pretty amazing that they were taken seriously (or at least made to believe that they were). I’m not saying I believe that there was some massive conspiracy to breach the levees, I just thought it was interesting/disturbing. Apparently it’s fairly common practice to “guide” floods in this manner to minimize destruction though. In fact the tactic was used during the Mississippi river flood in 1927 in order to save New Orleans. 30 tons of dynamite were used to breach the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana so that it wouldn’t flood New Orleans, which was owned by powerful banking families. Following the flood 13,000 African American refugees were detained and forced into labor at gunpoint as ships came to save white women and children. They were denied food, water, pay, and access to the city without tags to prove that they were working on the levee. Nearly 80 years later, not much has changed.

Don’t take my word for it though:

• PBS: Voices from the flood: Protecting the levee
• PBS: American Experience: Fatal Flood Timeline
• Book Review - Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it Changed America

The panel will continue next week, with questions for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.