Travis's lame ol' blog

Lowes has their plants on sale, 50% off. Apparently fall is the best time to plant shrubs as well so Sherry and I picked up a bunch. I was reading the tags from one of the bushes I planted and it says: "This plant is patented; vegetative propagation is prohibited." The plant is a China Boy Holly (Ilex x meserveae 'China Boy'), the reason I bought it was to pollinate the China Girl Holly we have. Apparently Conard-Pyle Company owns Plant Patent #4803 on this bad boy. Since when have you been able to patent a living thing? Well, since 1985 (for plants). Apparently the only reason that plants are allowed to be patented is because companies have invested tons of money in creating these hybrids and they don't want copycats to rip them off. It just seems kinda bizarro to me. I think I'm going to patent Sherry's dog so that I can sue everyone who owns a Brittany-spaniel-mutt - err I mean, keep those copycats from stealing my ideas. Here's another article, lots of them in google.

Somehow I missed this Monday Matchup on Forbes last week. They have a little slideshow dealy in there too. I'm glad the article exists, because it will make more people aware of Firefox, but it could use a little more detail.

Well, no thanks to Frontier or Time Warner, I'm back online again. Apparently DSL isn't available in my area yet. It only took a week for Frontier to tell me that. They still haven't fixed a loud-ass buzzing noise in my phone line. Time Warner took their sweet ass time hooking up my cable and RoadRunner. I think my cable modem is older than me. Plus my cable box is an older Scientific Atlanta Explorer 2000. So help me god if that thing crashes even once... eh I'm sure it will. Tomorrow I'll have to find all those cool links that everyone already saw and post them anyway.

[UPDATE]: My phone is almost working again. I lost my dialtone on last Friday because Frontier was "fixing" it. Just a few minutes ago a repairman let me know that I'd have a dialtone again and that I could make local calls. He said he'd call me when I could receive incoming calls again.

I'll probably not be posting anything until the 30th when I get DSL at the new place, but I'll most likely keep my computer on till the 27th or so. I think that'll be one of the longest downtimes I've had in awhile.

Excluding the Nintendo 64, the Atari Jaguar and all their games, Atari is releasing the "first" 64-bit game called Shadow Ops. Aside from the fact that the game is natively 64-bit, it also sports [allegedly] awesome AI, higher detailed textures, and THX 5.1 sound. I wonder why they didn't go with 7.1? Ah well, it's good to see Atari on the cutting edge again.

"[...] Paramedics and residents picked up body parts scattered across the street and put them into boxes. Anguished men lifted charred bodies and lay them gently on stretchers. [...]"

Does anyone else get pissed off when they hear shit like this? I just found out yesterday that one of Sherry's good friend's husband was just killed over there not too long ago. I guess something went wrong when he was running a night convoy and his humvee hit a tank, rolled over 6 times, and he was killed. It makes me depressingly furious. I keep hoping there will be some kind of miracle and they will discover some WMD so that all these people won't have died in vain. Remember the good old days when we could make fun of our president for lying about an affair? or even "read my lips"? You can't really make too many jokes about going to war under false pretenses.

Business Week has a nice article talking about AMD's struggle. It also talks about Dell being the lone holdout as far as the big PC makers are concerned. Apparently Intel gives Dell millions of dollars towards marketing and stuff so it'll take a decent market-share slip for them to adopt. They've always been late-adopters anyways so I guess it would be expected.

...except that Spaf's analogies actually make sense. The dude definitely knows his stuff, that's for sure.

Enter to win $100,000, and if the person you refer wins then you win too. Wired says it's legit, so I guess that's pretty cool. It's actually kinda handy since my address will be changing soon and I'll need to update my voter info. (from Dennis)

After hearing about people wearing the purple-heart band-aid people making fun of John Kerry's war injuries, I decided to do a little research to see if I could find out what really happened. Snopes has a great write-up of what really happened. I can't think of a summary that would give enough justice to what he went through in Vietnam so you should probably just read the whole thing. I still don't think I'll vote for him, but god damn it do I respect him. There's no doubt in my mind that he'd be better than the current court-appointed miserable failure. (did he just say "love"?)