Jared’s Blog

Today, I’m supposed to be filled with patriotism. Instead, today only means I get a day off without having to take vacation. How can I be proud to live in America when America has so much wrong with it?

Recently, I saw Michael Moore’s new movie, Sicko. A scathing expose of the health care system in America. Many people don’t like Moore because of the way he spins information to tell his stories. Frankly, I tend to agree with most of what he says, so I look past it. This time around Moore spent relatively little time on camera and instead let a small group of people tell their stories. The message was clear, the health care system is broken. People who are sick aren’t getting the care they need to be well or even stay alive.

The movie hit very close to home 2 days after I watched it. We do not have health insurance at TheHoneymoon because it simply was never before needed at the company. As result, my coworker and I both are on continued COBRA coverage. My coworker’s former employer decided to close the business and thus ending my coworker’s insurance policy. She was told by one representative at the insurance company that her coverage would continue until the end of the month only to find out the next week that she was without any coverage at all. She was left with $700 in prescriptions to pay for. I watched her, tears streaming down her face, call the pharmacy asking them if she could pay for her prescriptions 1 week at a time. Sadly, stories like this are all too common.

We are fighting an undeclared war against an intangible opponent, terrorism. The deaths of soldiers long ago exceeded the number who lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks. President Bush insists that sending more troops to their death is the answer. Not to mention all the innocent journalists and civilians who get caught up in the battles.

We have a president who thinks he can do whatever he wishes. When he gets into legal trouble, he just changes the law or makes himself exempt. Most recently, he commuted the sentence of a convicted man because he thought it was “too harsh.” That’s right, Mr. Bush. Rich white lawyer friends of yours should never have to go to that awful place called prison. They can pay a fine and go on probation and that’s good enough. Oh please! Of course I speak of the Scooter Libby case which has now become another scandal. One of many in the past 8 years.

Yesterday, I read a striking story on Digg about a man who was moving. This man, a Holocaust survivor, was moving back to Germany because “…I’ve seen this before.” As a boy, the man had watched Hitler’s government commit atrocity after atrocity and no one did anything about it. The parallels between the Bush administration and Hitler’s government were too much. The man felt he was too old to do anything to stop it and so he was moving out of Bush’s grasp of power.

Millions of Americans will be drinking, BBQing, and watching fireworks today. I ask again, what is it they are celebrating?

Pownce is the newest site from Kevin Rose. Normally I’m behind everything Kevin does because he’s a geek like me. We share that common dork wavelength. But I’ve encountered a number of things that bug me about Pownce already.

First of all is the whole AIR thing. I don’t want to download AIR. Can’t Flash already run on the desktop outside of the browser? I remember E-cards from Streetwise working like that back in the day. What I’m really saying is AIR is too new and doesn’t yet have that killer application that makes me want to download it. Sorry Pownce.

Some other Web 2.0 shoe-ins are missing as well. Where’s my RSS feeds? I should at least be able to subscribe to a feed of all the notifications that come in. I’m also a little puzzled why Daniel Burka didn’t take the 30 seconds it’d take him to create a favicon. They are such an important branding tool. I guess they must all be Safari users.

It annoys me that there is a premium paid service. While it’s certainly within his right to charge for a premium service, something about it feels dirty. I’ve always thought of Kevin as a dork first and a businessman later. Digg Pro accounts coming soon?

In the grand scheme of things, Pownce is just Twitter (but without the heavy focus on mobiles) or Jaiku (without the feed aggregation). Surely these are features that could be added, but it always looks better to be the innovator. This seems to be what the Pownce team is aiming for with their 10MB (100MB for paid users) file sharing and events services. It will be interesting if to see if Pownce is nearly as successful as Digg. The news market was a crowded place when Digg came on the scene and social IM is looking more and more crowded every day.

Update: Thanks to a Digg story, I was able to get an RSS feed of my public posts on Pownce. Now you can find my pownces(?) in Jaiku.

What game turned you into a gamer?

read more | digg story

Yesterday was Father’s Day and today I saw this story on Digg which made me remember my dad.

The question is what game turned you into a gamer. I thought a little bit and it was hard for me to pinpoint one single game. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a gamer most of my life and so it’s always just been part of who I am. I continued thinking and I tried to remember the first game I remembered playing. The first one that came to mind was Galaga.

The mall in town had a small arcade with about a dozen cabinets, one of which was “the spaceship game.” I was probably 6 years old at the time and as you can guess, the games were a little beyond me. I don’t think I could see the screen if I stood in front of the machine. So either my dad would play while I watched or he’d hold me up and it was my job to hit the shoot button as fast as possible. As you can imagine, we didn’t ever get too far, but I enjoyed every second of it.

While I wouldn’t consider my dad a gamer, there were a few games that I think he played more than I did. One time I remember waking up at 1AM to find my him playing a level farther into Blaster Master than I’d ever been. Another is SimCity 2000. I think that one got him in trouble with Mom a few times.

Looking back, many of my good gaming memories included my dad in some way. Maybe he’s responsible for my love of gaming.

New study finds “many adolescent “metalheads” are extremely bright and often use the music to help them deal with the stresses and strains of being gifted social outsiders.” Haha, validation.

read more | digg story

This really explains a lot about me.

The RFID in new US Passports is easily spoofed. What’s a paranoid US denizen to do? Why smash your Passport with a hammer!

read more | digg story

I made the Digg homepage! I am a geek superstar! Not really, but after participating in Digg for over a year now, I finally managed to submit an article the masses deemed worthy of the front page. The article hits close to home for me as I just acquired a passport myself. I’m not quite sure if mine has the RFID tag in it or not because I’ve read several conflicting articles. Some say the change was made in October this year, some say January next year. If anyone could clear that up, I would appreciate it.

Straight from the horses mouth, AMD press release announces $5.4 bn acquisition of ATI. Where does this leave AMD-NVIDIA??
read more | digg story

I heard the rumors a couple weeks ago and I got excited. Then things quieted down and I just gave up hope. Over the weekend there were a few rumblings of an announcement coming today and figured I’d just wait and see. So here we are, AMD and just purchased ATI. As the title says, this changes everything.

More than anything, it raises a number of questions. What does this mean for the nForce line of motherboards? Will we see AMD chips on ATI graphic boards? Mulit-core GPU’s anyone? What does this mean for ATI’s Intel supporting chipset? How closely will the two companies integrate their products? Intel + nVidia?
Personally, I’m worried about nForce. I hope nVidia doesn’t just drop AMD altogether. nForce has become the top of the line AMD chipset and it’d be a real problem if nVidia just decides to give up that market. Then again, maybe AMD will start producing it’s own chipsets with the help of ATI, just like Intel does now.

There’s just too many questions at this point and it’s going to be some time before the two companies really start to produce a combined product. Only time will tell, but let’s hope that time decides to give up the ghost sooner than later.