The ISO appeals process has failed with regards to the OOXML standard.  A process that fails should be scrapped.  Time for a new standard for standards.

I don’t like advertising.  Sometimes it can be ahem tolerable.  But most of the time I go out of my way to avoid it.

In fact, web ads are blocked. On the rare occasions I’m reading a magazine of a topic I care about I am prepared to ignore them.  Once a week when I read the Sunday New York Times, I ignore them.  And, television ads are mostly skipped automatically using the MythTV commercial flagging system.

So occasionally I end up watching ads, when MythTV fails to detect them properly. I’m accustomed to the auto-skip so I don’t realize what’s happening for a few seconds.  If it’s a decent premise I’ll watch an advert until I get tired of it or I feel like I’m actively being targeted to buy the product.

What troubles me is these annoying jingles.  They’re designed to be annoying and to burrow themselves into your brain like a mole and root around in there until you can’t get the bugger out.  And they can just pop into your head.

Let me clarify.  Music pops into my head all day long.  All the songs I know and love from all the bands I know and love: I’ll be doing the laundry and suddenly it’s California Redemption provides him with his rent, room and board inside of a fifth of Comfort, or I’ll be going through my RSS reader hearing, he’s an elevator passenger, bored as he can be and that’s cool.  I don’t always have headphones on or music handy, but you listen to music enough it’s just with you and it’s a thrill to have around.

I could be 90 years old with dimentia or alzheimers or some other form of mental decline, laying in my own piss and singing your stupid fucking jingles in my head.  Is that what you want?  Sick bastards.  I take time and put effort into finding good music to have stuck in my head.  And now any jackass with the money to put some crap product and a tv jingle out has access to me for the rest of my bloody life.

That’s unethical, I’m fucking sorry.

The Attorney General has admitted that he willfully conspires to avoid enforcing the law.  Congress should impeach him.  The law must be upheld and those guilty parties must be tried publicly for the government to continue to function at all.  It is unconsciounable to have public servants directly and flagrantly violate the will of the people as codified in statute.

That is all.

More oil is bad business for the USA.  Offshore drilling is a dumb idea.

I believe limited investment in biofuels makes sense purely because of the volume of combustion engines that exist and may continue to be used for a long time yet, but even these are pure dinosaurs.

The future lies in electricity generated from clean technologies including fuel cells, solar, geothermal, wind, hydro, and more solar.  Electric motors are far simpler beasts than combustion engines.  They are quieter, more efficient, more robust.  While there are some technological hurdles, they have a lot going for them.

We need to stop focusing so much on oil.  The current oil prices are down, but the respit from pain is not a good reason to hug the barrels.  We need to reduce our oil use by 50% by the year 2015 or we risk continuing the current economic cycle that has been going on for more than 60 years.

The new cycle if we get serious about shifting our economy to better technology that requires greater R&D but greater payoffs would be a boon for the next 100 years at the least.  Our old way of doing things has a much slower and choppier growth pattern which perpetuates a lot of industries that do more harm than good.

The bottom line is that if you want your children to live in a world with the same old problems (and the over 9000 lb. mutant zoo animal in the room, the melting of the poles) you can choose oil.  If you want a better world, there are better choices.  I’ve made my decision, personally.

Wow. A Japanese website called Windows Forest posted a review of Bookstack on July 21st [Windows Forest review of Bookstack]

The result was somewhere around 1,000 downloads and as of the most recent statistics on the Mozilla Addons site over 700 600 500 people are now using Bookstack.

0.5.3 is closing fast on the gates of releasedom.

That is all.