“A City Council member, reacting to a video store holdup believed to have been carried out by children, says parents who can’t properly care for their kids should be sterilized.”

As I am not a parent, with the exception of pets, my view may be a little skewed in favor of this. However I know of plenty of people that would advocate an extreme measure like this. If you, as a parent, can not raise your child(ren) properly and instill good moral and ethical values in them, you have NO business being a parent. Irresponsible parents are no longer “parents”, they’re “breeders”.

My 2¢
Addenum: Sorry if I seemed cruel in posting my thoughts on this. I don’t advocate forced sterilization; that would be big step in “Third Reich” thinking. However, I wouldn’t be opposed to people requiring a license to procreate. One of the requirements would be real world common sense, seeing as many “parents” seem to be lacking in this quality. That’s my other 2¢!

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Tags: Parenting, Bad Kids

Apple has been getting a lot of press lately, both good and bad. With every good comment or article about their products, both hardware and software, there’s a bad comment or article about an ethical or moral stance Apple puportedly has. I see articles with complaints like (and this is all paraphrase, folks!) “Apple’s FairPlay DRM is evil!” (from eff.org) or “Apple’s products need to be more green-conscious!” (from Greenpeace.org). I have my own thoughts on these matters, but I’ll save them for another soon-to-be-posted article.

I think, speaking from experience as well as other articles I’ve seen, that Apple is one of the very best at customer service. I work in retail, and I know that the retail rule-of-thumb in service is “The customer is always right”; I also know that phrase is sheer bullcrap! However, you do what you can, within reason, to give the customer a wide latitude and ensure their continued patronage, and Apple certainly does this. The perfect example happened recently when actor and writer Wil Wheaton (remember ST:TNG’s Wesley Crusher, the annoying know-it-all teen?!) wrote in his “In Exile” blog about Apple’s customer service concerning his iTMS purchases. Just click that last line and read up.

I’ll say from my personal experience, in getting the iMac G5 that I’m currently typing this out on fixed, that it was a small hassle having to drag the whole computer in last year to a nearby Apple store to be repaired. You can read my blog entry on the burning incident here. They could have just sent me the part that I needed, since I told them I had opened the computer and diagnosed the part in question, but they insisted that their techs look it over to see if anything else needed to be replaced (in other words, they wanted to see if I screwed it up myself, thus nullifying any warranty!). After all was said and done, the diagnosics and repairs cost me nothing aside from a weekend without my trusty iMac. I have no reason to complain about something done for free!

Now I’m turning it over to all (?) my readers… Do you have any examples of awesome customer service? It can be any business, not just Apple. Like I said, I work in retail so this subject hits home for me in both my job and as a consumer too.

Speak up, and cheers!

Tags: Apple, service, Wil Wheaton

First, a reference to Joel Rieman’s memorial on The Esoterik Blog (click the sentence)…

Now for an update, since I’ve had some time to digest all that has gone on since then.  The Rieman family has, for the last year, been healing very well from their loss. Again, I regret that I hadn’t gotten to know him well when he was with us. From observing him on the few occasions, I found I enjoyed his company. However I found out that, besides me and the family, someone else had this regret too.

About a month or so ago, I recieved a strange phone call. A young lady, who’s name I later learned is Joy, was doing a search on Joel to find out what’s been going on with him. As many of us know, the internet seems to be bigger than the world itself, in regards to all the different kinds of information that you can dig up on someone. Sometimes it’s better than hiring a private detective! As I talked with her, she explained that she had once dated Joel and, even though things didn’t work out, remained good friends with him. She hadn’t talked to him for several years and wanted to see how he was doing after all this time. Anyways, through the magic of Google, she found his name in this blog… along with the heart-breaking revelation of his passing. The good thing that came out of all this is that I refered her to Joel’s mother, whom she called the next day. Plans were made for Joy to join the family on the anniversary of his passing, coincidentally just two weeks from then.

It’s unfortunate when time and distance keeps any of us from regular communication with those we care about. Even in our technologically advanced culture, the simple act of the written word or phone call is treated as an afterthought. I guess one lesson learned here is, even though many people say that you should always tell someone how much you appreciate them because you don’t know when you’ll get the chance again, there will always be something left unsaid, something left undone. It’s best to live for the here and now, put your trust in God to guide your mind and heart, and let come what may. There’s a reason that things happen the way they do, even if we can’t understand why, and we may never know the answer. All we can do is keep the faith in our hearts that things will work out for the best, even if it seems crazy at the time.

The other lesson is that blogs are good for more than the mere journalling of one’s thoughts. Cruise through a stranger’s blog and you may find interesting or useful info. I’ll have to remind myself to update the blogroll in the sidebar!

Cheers and blessings to all!!

I have recently opened up Pandora’s Box… and so far, wonderful things have come out of it!

A project was started a while back, I really can’t find out exactly when, called The Music Genome Project. Modeled after the Human Genome Project, but of course involving music, the project constantly strives to acquire many different kinds of songs, artists, albums and analyze these songs using hundreds of different variables. The people running this project have a huge library of music and seem inclined to continue the experiment by letting the web-community create “stations” of music they love using this gigantic library.

Pandora is the result and, WOW, I love it! Essentially, the site is a Flash page that, when you first visit, asks you for a song or artist (or band) that you like. If you give a song, due to current laws they can’t play the song you input, but it will play a similar selection. From there, a “station” is created with that sonic variable(s) as a starting point. As a song plays, you have the option of giving a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. If it’s down, the site will play a different song and artist for you to try. The program stores your choices of what you like, and don’t like, to hear and makes adjustments to its choices accordingly. Also, you can edit the station and add other artists and songs in styles that you feel would contribute to the station’s overall sound.

So far, I’ve made four visits to the site. The first was to try it out. You don’t need an account to try it; as far as I could tell, you can try it many times. My second visit, I opened a free account (Yes! It’s free! (but with ads on the page)) and made my current station, Symphony of Power, since I’ve been on quite the power metal kick. These first two visits were a series of me selecting thumbs up, down, down, up, down, up, down… you get the idea. During my third visit, I found myself adding more bands (I started with Sonata Arctica) that I knew, and also was encountering thanks to Pandora’s library. The thumbs up were becoming more frequent, as the programming was selectively weeding out music that, from my thumbs down selections, I was indicating that I didn’t want to hear. Today is my fourth visit. Out of 26 songs, which is the most I’ve listened to on any visit, I only disagreed with 4 choices. Not a bad learning curve for a piece of web software!

Well, I’m on my 27th song, a selection from Scorpions Unbreakable album called “Deep and Dark”. For songs that I like but may not fit what I consider the station profile, I won’t give a thumb up or down. I’ll see what happens down the line. I think this is a great idea for internet radio! Not quite request-based, but you still control much of how the music you hear is selected. Uh oh… live Dream Theater just came on and I’m now in heaven. To all music lovers, you owe it to yourself to check out this site. You’ll be glad you did!

You can visit my Pandora profile page by clicking this sentence. To listen to my Pandora station, just click the station, Symphony of Power, featured in my profile.
Cheers… and happy listening!

Tags: Music Listening, Internet Radio, Music, Radio

Y’know, I love YouTube about as much as most sane people. I have an account, and I uploaded one video so far onto it; Emily’s music video. It’s a great repository of visual content from every source imaginable.

I think Google Video will beat YouTube, however. Only a matter of time. With YouTube, you can’t exactly download the video content. I downloaded the Google video player, and got my first vid; Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater’s filming of “Making of ‘Train of Thought’”. Decent quality, rivalling anything I’ve seen in YouTube. Today I downloaded a made-for-iPod video of DragonForce’s “Through The Fire And Flames”. After being in headbanger bliss for awhile after that, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll be going to Google Video more often!

Cheers!