Rage Against the Machine go a capella at RNC protest after cops shut down PA – Boing Boing.

This actually gave me goosebumps.  Political protesting is as much of an art as any other kind of expression and the guys from Rage Against the Machine know how to do it right.

When the police shut down the PA on Rage Against the Machine at an anti-RNC concert, the band took to the turf with a megaphone and performed a capella, delivering inspiring commentary between songs. This is must-see youtube — some of the most heartening protest footage I’ve seen in years.

I’m going to try to track down the embed code for the video but the link above has it.
Update: I need to use Youtube more.  Duh.  The embed code is right there in the clip.

I like Rage Against the Machine, mostly in small doses.  Despite not agreeing with all of their political views the music has passion, committment and message folded together in a high energy package.  This clip shows how committed they are to their own message.  Zack del la Rocha ends the impromptu acapella session with the simple directive “please leave peacfully”.

I like to think I am fairly literate and a decent speller.  But we all have bad days or moments and if you were to read over my posts from the last few weeks you might begin to think that I am truly a moron.  I prefer to think that is not the case.  Rather, I’ve simply become too reliant on spell checkers.  In this case, the very nice one built into Firefox.

The problem is, for some reason when writing a post in Word Press, the checker doesn’t kick in.  If I save the post and re-open it, no problems.  I can see all the silly mistakes I made.  But on the initial writing?  Nothing.

So I will be cleaning up the recent spate of horrendous typos and hopefully will be smart enough to save and then re-open future posts.

My apologies for forcing you to read such awful typing.

I’m sure I won’t actually purchase this for awhile.  Several things will keep me away from it but one huge thing will keep calling my name.

ELECTRONIC ARTS’ long awaited evolution title Spore is at last set to go on sale at the end of this week, about three and a half years after the game company began work on it.

Spore to finally appear later this week – The INQUIRER.

Reasons to avoid this game!

First and foremost, I like my wife.  I enjoy being married and I work hard at domestic bliss.  This game is clearly a threat to all of that.  I have had whole weeks of my life swallowed by The Sims, Civ III and X-Com.  Spore promises to combine the most addictive properties of each and add a meth-like euphoria besides.

Second, while I haven’t seen the hardware requirements yet, I’m almost certain that any machine in my house would labor under the massive world of Spore.  Its the old Total Cost of Ownership question.  However much I may want the game, I can’t justify the extra dollars I’ll need to shell out for a new graphics card.

Finally, there is my general aversion to buying anything as soon as it hits the shelves.  I firmly expect to see a slate of user generated problems and vulnerabilities as soon as the public gets the full game installed.

And Yet…

Have you seen what this thing will do? I mean really!  It is the apex of gaming for someone like me who enjoys turn based strategy and world building.  I know I am going to hear the Sirens’ call for as long as this thing is in the wild.

I have been having a pretty fun holiday punctuated by getting a couple of computer related tasks taken care of.

First, I have pulled full backups of all the domains I host.  Surprisingly to me, this number has grown to double digits (ok, 10.  But that counts, right?)  The backups themselves aren’t notable but having the host FTP them directly into my home server was a first time event that I think deserves some note.

Second, after months of having two brand new 320 gig hard drives laying around doing nothing I have finally installed them and set them up.  Now everything is separated in a way that makes me happy (for awhile at least).  One physical drive for the OS (Ubuntu Heron at the moment), one for data and one for backup.  I also have full and incremental backups scheduled.

I am still amazed sometimes at the things I now take for granted that a few years ago sounded like rocket science.  Opening a port on the router so that the FTP server can be accessed from outside the network sounds like it should be abig deal.  Heck, having an FTP server at all is something I used to wish for but figured would never happen.

The lesson for me is the same as ever.  Technology for its own sake is fun but if you really want to learn something, find a problem that needs solving and then solve it.  You may have to make up a problem, but having an end point in mind makes learning a new tool easy.  You’re so worried about the solution that you hardly notice when you’ve suddenly leveled up in geekiness.

For my next task, I need to find a problem that requires a VPN set up at the house.