Comcast Acquiring Plaxo

Opening my email this morning I was accosted by the potentially unfortunately news that Comcast is acquiring Plaxo.

Now, I had never heard of Plaxo until I found out that they had linked up with AOL to handle address book moves.

At first that's all they were - this service where you could keep an on-line address book and then your contacts could keep their own contact information updated themselves.

Of course it wasn't terribly useful at all, because if you contacts stopped used Plaxo your address books would automatically update with outdated information.

And THEN they tried to clone LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter simultaneously.

The blog traffic seems to point to a concern that Plaxo, backed by a major telecomm player, will now get even MORE obnoxious with the unwelcome and semi-unwelcome emails.

Well, of COURSE, if you email anyone at all, you're eventually going to get invites from social networking sites, but what worries me about this is that Comcast is the outfit that not only throttles BitTorrent traffic but lies to the FCC about throttling BitTorrent traffic.

Now they're going to know who all your friends and business associates are.

That is JUST lovely.

I think I'm going to start dismantling my accounts there like TODAY ...

Related:
Comcast Gets Plaxo to Users' Dismay - eWeek.com
Comcast acquires social network pioneer Plaxo - Reuters
Plaxo Confession: Acquired by Comcast - Mashable
Plaxo is acquired by Comcast, Zyb by Vodafone - Lifeblog
Plaxo acquired by Comcast - Nicolas Schriver's Blog

"Free" TV Converter Box Ad In The Cincinnati Enquirer

For those of you who have been keeping up on the digital TV conversion scheduled for early next year, you may have noticed that ginormous "free digital TV" ad in today's Cincinnati Enquirer.

Fortunately John Matarese over at WCPO spared no time narcing on the ad AND the Enquirer.

Turns out the scam in this ad is that you have to pay for a 5-year warranty plus shipping - almost $70 - most decidedly not free.

Now the way this operation is actually supposed to work is that you're supposed to apply for your coupons at the DTV2009.gov site, the government will ship them out (now, be careful, they come in a fairly non-descript #10 envelope that could pass for junk mail). They look like a couple of red credit cards.

The way it's supposed to work is you're supposed to saunter over to Radio Shack, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc., and fork over one of these coupons along with $20 and, voila, you'll have your digital - analog converting tuner.

Obviously this process is WAY too complicated for many people and so the Enquirer obviously is taking great delight in helping to rip people off.

Oh, John Matarese - you need to narc on the government too. They set these coupons up to expire maybe 60 days after you get them and - guess what? - the cotton-picking analog pass-through converters won't be available until later this year so we may never see channel 25 again.

Yep ... I'm thinking someone should have put more thought into this whole deal. Come next February there's going to be pandemonium I betcha' ...

Michelle Obama Pounding The Phones In Kentucky

But Hillary won the damn thing anyway ...

Nate Livingston BANNED From Blogger!!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, a legend of the Cincinnati blogosphere, my old Aiken High School buddy, Nate Livingston, has been BANNED from Blogger - presumably for publishing the names, dates of birth, addresses, and various other personal information associated with several individuals he was mad at for, as he explains it, posting personal information about his daughter.

I just found out about this myself from a comment over at the Cincinnati Beacon.

My guess is that it won't take more than a couple of days for Nate to be back up and running on Wordpress or somewhere of that sort.

Now, onto the rest of the comment from "Urbanists II is Dead" - he doesn't seem to get the point on my latest riff in response to a comment that someone made that "Nate Livingston is a racist".

A few months back, The Dean posted a considerable diatribe taking umbrage with the fact that the media calls Barack Obama "Black", whereas, so far as we know, Obama's Anestry-By-DNA test would come back almost exactly 1/2 African and 1/2 European, or, in conventional terms, almost exactly 1/2 "Black" and 1/2 "White".

However, somewhere in the last couple of generations, it stopped working like this. When I was in high school, occasionally a few people would be called "mixed", but, by the time I got to high school this practice had pretty much stopped and the term became "light-skinned black".

And then of course sometime in the last 20 years it seems that pretty much so long as there are any visible African traits left in a person at all, even if they are 1/4 or even 1/8 African agains 3/4 or 7/8 European, they tend to still be called "Black".

This change in procedure I remember being articulated the most specifically by Halle Berry's mother, who, in an interview said that she, if I remember the words correctly, "raised Halle exclusively Black". I imagine this may have been to avoid confusion or something of the sort.

Then The Dean comes along and somehow takes great umbrage with the fact that, if you can follow this logic, the fact that the media calls Obama "Black" negates the White ancestry of his own children.

Get with the program, dude.

Henry Louis Gates: "Does it upset you that we found this much European ancestry in your background?"

Maya Angelou: "Why? It's who I am."

Yes, you can be absolutely, 100%, unabasedly, unashamedly (reviewing the Trinity United Church of Christ web site quickly) Black and STILL have a European-linked Y-chromosome, European linked mitochondria and maybe pushing 7/8 European nuclear DNA.

The truly enlightened (and here's where I start an argument :) ) would get hip to the fact that having European ancestry and coming into contact with people of European ancestry is an inalienable element of BEING Black in America.

My comments of course were more about THE DEAN than about Nate.

You see - I knew Nate's family in high school.

In fact, I was in the motorcade with his sister when she was picked up by her prom date - a young man of considerable European and Native American ancestry who called himself "White". This was considered just slightly scandalous at the time, but I remember her mother saying something to the effect, "Oh, that's not so bad - I mean - goodness gracious - my grandmother married a White man."

Presuming that Nate and his sister had both parents in common, this makes Nate at least 1/8th European. According to The Dean, it sounds like if you have more than 1/8th of your ancestry different from your "primary" ethnic identity, you lose your ethnic identity privileges altogether. This would mean that Nate is neither White nor Black, and, if that were the case, I'd say it would be pretty difficult to be racist.

But of course Nate considers himself Black.

And maybe a little like Malcolm X, perhaps his knowledge of his European ancestry makes him even meaner?

Maybe we should just have Nate sit down with Maya Angelou for a heart-to-heart and he could at least keep himself out of trouble for a while ...

Related:
Nate Livingston– Get a Grip, Man! - Cincy Report

Windows XP SP3 Post Mortem

I think it's been - what? - at least a couple of weeks now?

I went to the Windows Update site on both my computer and Mrs. Axinar's computer when I first saw that the Windows XP SP3 updates were out.

The install was UTTERLY flawless on Mrs. Axinar's computer. No hitches at all.

Mine STARTED to do the "endless reboot" thing, but after the second reboot it came to its senses.

Now, the information coming out is that some of the HP machines with AMD chips were having trouble because HP created the original XP image on Intel machines and then used them on the AMD models. Apparently there were some "dormant" Intel drivers left over that were driving SP3 nuts. Patches are coming out for this problem as we speak.

HOWEVER, my main machine is a Gateway 825GM, which is an Intel machine.

However, it is an incredibly SOUPED UP Gateway 825GM - upgraded graphics card, upgraded audio, etc., etc.

I'm guessing maybe that one reboot cycle may have been caused by some "dormant" drivers on my machine for the original video and/or audio configuration perhaps.

The question I have for y'all though ...

Have any of you noticed that your machines boot up MUCH faster under SP3???

An Impure Thought About Amanda Mayes

Well, we hadn't heard anything from our good buddy Nate Livingston for a while until the last few days when he has been posting a series of messages, about, if I'm reading this correctly, some sort of custody battle he is having with someone named Amanda Estelle Mayes.

Now, today's posting included a really fascinating photograph of Ms. Mayes from some sort of protest where she was toting an anti-semitic sign.

Yes - puts me in mind immediately of Joy Rolland.

Wait a minute - I do believe Nate Livingston at one time was involved with Joy Rolland as well.

Does this officially make Nate Livingston an even bigger NUT MAGNET than ME??

Now I'm contemplating a few things - partiuclarly about this photograph.

For starters, as much as I hate to admit it, I've already had an impure thought about Amanda Mayes.

And despite, I presume, being involved with at least one pro-African-American protest group, I'm guessing The Dean of Cincinnati would not even be willing to concede that Ms. Mayes IS BLACK.

Two - and this is frightening to the core of human existence - she has Crankshaft's PERMASMIRK. Now, I'm presuming that this doesn't mean that Crankshaft is Black, but rather their common European ancestor ... well ... let's just say that can't POSSIBLY have been a very nice person.

Now, next, although the photograph does not have much resolution, one cannot rule out the very real possibility that Ms. Mayes herself has some Jewish ancestry.

Wouldn't that be a blast?

Now, onto Nate.

Apparently he's produced at least a daughter with Ms. Mayes.

I don't know why exactly, but this is putting me in mind of the one letter that NBC recieved after the first "interracial kiss on television" between William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols. The letter went something like, "Now, I don't believe in the mixing of the races, but when a red-blooded American boy like Jim Kirk gets a good looking gal like Lt. Uhura in his arms he just can't help himself."

Looks like when Nate Livingston comes into contact with bright, but slightly "off" light-skinned Black women ...

Well ... you get the picture ... :)

Of course the most incredibly disappointing thing is that it doesn't look like Amanda Mayes has either a blog OR a Public Access cable television show.

Oh, well ...

At very least maybe Nate will post some more pictures ... :)

"A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle: Review

As many of you know, Mrs. Axinar is a HUGE Oprah Winfrey fan and when we went to Chicago back in February to be audience members for the taping of Oprah segments with Valerie Bertinelli and William Shatner, Oprah also taped some spots for her "online class" featuring a book called "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle.

Well, the waiting list at the library was MASSIVE. Just last week I got the hard cover and the Book-On-CD and I've been starting to listen to it and I'm finding myself scratching my head.

He made the recording for the Book-On-CD himself and the first question I'm asking myself, "What IS that accent??" Bavarian? Austrian? All his Wikipedia bio says is that he was born in Germany. Now there are a few YouTube clips of him and in this particular one he's a little more animated than on the "A New Earth" Book-on-CD, but, I'm telling you, on the CD, he's putting me in mind of Malachi Throne's version of "The Keeper" from the B&W workprint of the first Star Trek pilot, "The Cage".

Of course then I got to thinking - was Malachi Throne DELIBERATELY trying to do a German (and specifically a SOUTH German) accent for The Keeper?

In fact, there is a remnant of the Malachi Throne voiceover of The Keeper in the preview of "The Mangerie" Part II.

I haven't gotten very far along in the CD, but I took a quick look through the hardcover and it's looking to be a pretty quick review of Buddhism.

Actually between trying to listen to that CD and watch What the Bleep!? - Down the Rabbit Hole" at the same time and I'm starting to get spacey.

Oh, speaking of which ... the goofnozzles at our Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County CLEARLY did not take a good look over this set because in their excitement to split this set up into the "movie" part and the "extra footage" part, they completely overlooked the fact that the extra-long "Quantum Edition" version of the movie is spread out over disk 2 and disk 3 of the set, so, yes, my friends, I'm watching What the Bleep!? - Down the Rabbit Hole OUT OF ORDER. Now, if that's not enough proof that I've started to take a turn around the bend, I'm not sure what would be.

Oh, and if that's not bad enough, the "Quantum" cut of "What the Bleep!?" has both Ramtha AND JZ Knight.

I'm not sure what to make of this, "Your thoughts create your reality," stuff.

I suppose in some sense it would be nice if one, by sheer force of will, could eliminate all suffering.

However, I think I'm more into the view of life taught to me by a rabbi from Canada once. Citing Ralph Nader this rabbi pretty much explained that, properly directed, righteous indignation is a GOOD thing.

In other words - there really ARE rotten bastards out there and people of good conscience ought to make concerted efforts to STOP them from being rotten bastards.

Or at least stop them from spreading their misery to others ...