Happy Thanksgiving Everyone. I wanted to take the time to remind people about Buy Nothing Day. Buy Nothing Day is a celebration of frugal living, and remembering that life is not about consuming.
As a part of this rememberance, I encourage everyone to take note of their ecological footprint. It’s important to remember that 20% of the world’s populations consumes 80% of the world’s resources. “Development” in the traditional sense is completely unsustainable with the resources that we have on this planet.
This month has beena whirl-wind of company. We’re lucky to have such great people care about us enough to come to DC and visit. Dana’s parents left early last week, and our great friend Travis came in a few days later. We went to a couple concerts, ate some great food (Ben’s Chili Bowl, The Old Siam, La Loma [twice], Al’s Pizza to name a few…).
My parents are coming in Wednesday for Thanksgiving, and I’m really excited that they’re coming to visit. We will have a great time, and great food!
Dana and I, and her parents went to New York City the weekend of November 11. You can see some photos from our adventure here. It was an amazing time, and we’re really happy we got to go with Dana’s family. A big thanks to Tom and Judy too for showing us around (Dana’s aunt and uncle).
You can see some photos from Travis’ visit here.
Thankfully Sony’s idiotic program that they accompany with certain CDs has given them a lot of bad press, and brought the mainstream media’s attention to DRM (Digital Rights Management). I cannot give you a good example of DRM, but what I can say is that I am WAY less likely to buy a CD (if I bought CDs that is…) that would allow me to play it only on one computer than to rip it to my mp3 player and play it on my work computer. These two things, of course, are rights given to you under “fair use” clauses associated with copyright. Howerver, Sony does not allow you these rights if you purchase one of the CDs listed above.
Sony, get a life…and stay out of mine.
Sony is taking a new approach to protecting it’s music, by using an old hacker trademark technique: installing a rootkit onto your computer. A rootkit is a piece of software that installs itself deep into your computer (deeper than spyware), and can allow for a person to have complete and total control of your computer. This is a ridiculous breach of privacy, and pretty I find it amazing that they are doing this. Of course, Sony is rightfully getting blasted in media.
However, the thing that surprised me the most was Sony’s Director of Global Business’ comment on the matter:
Most people, I think, don’t even know what a root kit is, so why should they care about it? (1:57 on NPR)
I think I’ll leave it at that…
Dana and I decided on a whim Friday night that we wanted to go hiking. A friend of ours suggested Old Rag Mountain, which is a part of the Shenandoah National Park. Well, we got ourselves into a little more than we bargained for. The trail is about 7 miles. However, it’s a mile walk, uphill of course, from the parking lot to the start of the trail. Then, once you finish the trails. It’s another 2.5 mile walk back to the parking lot, because you come down on the opposite side of the mountain than you start on. So, 10.5 miles and about 5 hours after we started, we had conquered Old Rag Mountain.
It’s definitely one of the most fun and most difficult things I’ve done physically. We literally had to climb boulders in the middle of the path.
You can see all of the pictures from our journey here!
All too often, I think I forget about where I live and work. It’s really easy to see the same people everyday and think that what we’re doing is really average, every day stuff. Today was a startling reminder that this isn’t a normal old office…
Today, the Senate went into a closed session for the first time in 25 years. Senator Harry Reid invoked Rule 21, the rule that sends the Senate into a closed session where no one, but Senators are allowed on the floor:
I demand on behalf of the American people that we understand why these investigations aren’t being conducted, and in accordance with Rule 21, I now move that the Senate go into closed session.
Needless to say, I, and my co-workers were all caught off guard by this. It’s been an interesting day here, and I’m eager to see what will come of it.
New York Times article.
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