Second Team, Sega's Terrorist, and Software

So I'm watching my beloved Red Sox on ESPN tonight against the Indians, and frankly, it's hard to watch. It seems like Boston decided to put their second-teamers on the field tonight. Brian Daubach in left? McCarty at first? Kim pitching and giving up hits as if it's nothing? No wonder this game feels dead - all the big offensive threats aren't on the field. Trot and Nomar can't get back soon enough.

In other news, I found it hilarious that the government's threat matrix listed a character from a video game recently. Here's a tip to the Department of Defense: I hear that somebody named Vercetti has a stranglehold on the Miami vice trade, might want to look into that.

Much love to Bo for pointing out Adblock to me. If you're still using Internet Explorer, stop. Go download Mozilla Firefox - once you get used to tabbed browsing, the complete lack of popups [and banners with AdBlock], and the sheer speed, you'll leave IE6 behind [and if you use Outlook, give Mozilla Thunderbird a shot while you're at it - brilliant junk mail controls]. I was a Netscape fanatic, but after NS4.7, it became a slow piece of shit. If you've ever used Netscape 6 or 7, you know what I mean. It's nice to see an open source project finally surpass Internet Explorer. Now if OpenOffice.org can just improve their damned interface and surpass Office XP, I might be inclined to give the Penguin another shot on my desktop. Maybe I'll give the next Knoppix LiveCD a shot if they can figure out NTFS compatibility. I love the concept and notion of Free Software [because I'm both a cheap bastard and I think competition is better for all of us], but it's hard for a lot of the OSS apps to match the usability and presentation of Microsoft's software armada.

The best example of open/free software that I can think of is Exact Audio Copy. If you're using something other than EAC and LAME to rip your CDs to MP3, you really should give EAC a look. If you wanna know what settings I use, zip me an IM.

I'm gonna re-rank my 2003 and 2002 albums in iTunes in the next couple days, because I think I gave some albums an unfair share [Ozma] and completely forgot some albums [RHCP's By The Way].

And apparently Blogger just enabled comments on these things, so feel free to trash talk, offer critisms, or respond to these posts.