Same thing as every night, Pinky

Apple Corp. has foiled my plans to take over the world.

It seems the insidious lawyers at Apple have somehow discovered my plans to build an intercontinental ballistic missile and have prevented me from deploying it with this ingenious addition to the End User License Agreement for iTunes.

15. You also agree that you will not use these products for the development, design, manufacture, or production of missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Drat. And I was so close.

They even discovered my plans to sell my invention to Colonel Qaddafi, because they also added this restriction.

Apple Software may not be exported or re-exported (a) into (or to a national or resident of) any U.S. embargoed countries (currently Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria)

Oh, if only I hadn't pressed "I Agree" on that box. I was in such a hurry to listen to that new Elvis album, that I forgot to read it through carefully. You see that's they trap you. They get you so excited to listen to music that you momentarily forget that iTunes is the ideal navigation and command and control system. Then your hands are tied.

Curses. Foiled again.

Everyone's doing it

This little poll seems to be going around the blogospere. Here are my answers.

Sort by Song Title;
What are the first and last songs?

first: "D" For Dangerous, The Reverend Horton Heat
last: Zora (Interlude), Outkast

Sort by Artist; what are the first and last artists?

first: Aerosmith
last: ZZ Top

Sort by Time; what are the first and last songs?

first: Intro, The Offspring (:07)
last: Drugs and Kittens I'll Drink to That, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones (38:44) (A hidden track thingy.)
Longest actual track is Voodoo Chile, by Hendrix (15:00)

Sort by Album; what are the first and last albums?


first: 1947-1981 The RCA Years - (Disc 2), Chet Atkins
last: You Don't Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker, Willie Nelson

Top 5 Played Songs:

One Time For Me, The Reverend Horton Heat
Rock The Joint, ibid
Baddest Of The Bad, ibid
Hit That, The Offspring
It's Martini Time, The Reverend Horton Heat

Most Recent 5 of your Recently Added (Albums):

Alive!, Kiss
Super Hits, Marty Robbins
Stadium Arcadium, Red Hot Chili Peppers
Chet Atkins, Chet Atkins
Tuesday Night Music Club, Sheryl Crow

Find “sex” - how many songs show up? 2
Find “death” - how many songs show up? 3
Find “love” - how many songs show up? 116

Rank Experiment Update: Not so well. New rank, 2,001,478
Come on folks, would it kill ya to link to my blog?

The experiment begins

You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I can be quite competitive at times. Take, for example, my 5 year obsession with my rank in the Folding @ Home project. It started out as a group effort, nearly everyone crapped out, but I kept finding computers to put to the task. Occasionally computers that I didn't actually own, and at great risk to my job. It appears that I'm only interested in competing when there is a very clear metric, like team rank.

Supposing, for the moment, that there is still anyone in the world reading this blog, you will have noticed that I haven't updated it in months. I'm going to blame that on my job, but you don't necessarily have to believe that story. Nevertheless, it has become moribund. Frequently, I come up with an idea for a post, but they never seem to rise to a level of clever or sentimental that they could stand up against the few previous posts that I am quite proud of. Well, I guess I'll have to learn to get over that. Or perhaps I could learn to write well.

Either way, I've decided to make this a competition. Technorati has a list of every dopey blog ever written and has come up with some calculation that ranks their popularity. I have noticed that the blogs of some people, like my friend Lisa, who are quite, shall we say, normal, are quite popular (80,724) according to technorati. The fact that technorati knows me at all is encouraging.

I've decided to start watching the stats and chart my progress in popularity. Who knows, maybe after 10 years, someone might think I'm clever, or (dare I say it?) cool.

Today, then, the starting line is 1,978,754. That is my rank. Which means that there are nearly 2 million blogs that are more popular than mine. Which is depressing until you take into account that they are tracking 71 MILLION blogs. So I prefer to think that my blog is more popular than 69 million other blogs.

Postscript.
I just looked at my rank page on Folding @ Home, to link it above. Wow. A bunch of people have joined my team in the last week and contributed 1 work unit. Weird.