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The outcry against “M$” (every technically savvy author KNOWS that the only way to spell MS is with a dollar sign, cause only Micro$oft is vile enough to be in business to make money, not like Steve Jobs, who only “takes home a $1 a year salary.”) would be crazy, and rightly so.  If you don’t like what sites have to say, get out of the technology business, or figure out a way to make everyone love you.

Enter Apple.  Somehow, they have done just that.  Steve Jobs could announce tomorrow that the next big OS X release is that your computer will automatically stop working at midnight tomorrow, unless you pay $129 for the unlock code to the version of OS X you currently run (but “not stopping” will be listed as the #3 new feature of the new OS), and Apple fan sites would gush about how much better that is than Vista.

I’ve said that for years, but I’ve never had the proof I needed like I do tonight: ThinkSecret.com, a popular Apple gossip/prediction site, started 9 or so years ago by a 13 year old, has been successfully shut down by Apple’s legal team, and the now-22 year old site owner has posted that he’s “pleased to have reached this amicable settlement.”  His site, the site he started as a kid, has been shut down, and that pleases him?  WOW.  What can I say to that, other than, whatever Apple’s giving it’s fans to make them so brainlessly loyal and deliriously happy, I want some of it.  It has to be the best stuff money can buy.  And no, their software and hardware ain’t it.  Unless the hardware is coated with the substance that renders one that cluelessly giddy about life.

However, I don’t so much applaud the lack of watchable television.  As shows run out of new episodes, we’re left having to weed through more reality shows that anyone should legally have to endure.  And the networks all sell them as if they had planned on this all along.  (“Starting next week, watch ‘America’s next part time cashier,’ 5 nights a week for the next 13 weeks!  You won’t believe the hijinks!”)

Don’t worry, I’m getting to the “how to survive” part.

But here’s what really worries me about this strike: shows like “Scrubs,” which was slated to end this season, are pretty much out of new content, and according to the news tonight, the strike is showing no signs of ending.  So, what happens if spring rolls around, and there is no resolution.  If the season is effectively over now, does that mean we get no ending to “Scrubs?”  If that happens, I’ll snap.  Not sure what that will look like yet, but it may involve a lot of crying and drooling on my part.

So, anyhow, how does one survive without new, scripted electronic entertainment?  Well, I tell my kids occasionally that, at one point in human history (we’ll call it the pathetic ages), man did not have television.  Apparently they were too dumb or lazy to invent it or something.  Either way, they relied on things like books, each other (family sing-a-longs, stories told around the gas-log fire, sex, stuff like that), and I would imagine, the Internet.  I bet books are still around somewhere.  Try to find one in your house, pick it up, and attempt to actually READ IT.  Wow.

And you know what?  You can leave the house too.  Turns out exterior air won’t kill you (immediately).  Go out, walk around the neighborhood (like when the electricity goes out in the middle of a clear evening, and everyone secretly wonders if this is like that episode of the “Twilight Zone” where everyone turns on each other, so you all find yourself outside, talking to each other to find out), maybe even enjoy a park.  Ok, I know it’s winter, and like, really cold out.  So go to the mall and wander it for a while.  Whatever. 

The point is, life existed before TV, and I bet we could figure out how to make it work now.  Please, the bottom line is, don’t let reality shows get good ratings…  PLEASE?!

There has been a lot of noise on the news in the past few weeks (always leading off with a line like “some religious groups are upset about a new movie coming out, tune in at 11 to find out why!” as if we have no clue what one it could be…) about “The Golden Compass,” a movie based on a book by an atheist.  I guess the big problem people have with it is that it’s a book aimed at children.

I understand the reason religious groups are upset, and I don’t have any problem with them coming out with statements telling their followers to avoid seeing this movie.  But to raise arguments that it should never have been made, the studio should be boycotted, etc…. well, I don’t fully understand that.

Look, Christians have been making movies for years, many aimed at children.  Just a year or so ago, we got a movie based on “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis.  It never outright pushes Christianity, but everyone who saw it knows full well who Aslan represents. 

So my point is this: if there are movies based on Christian authors’ writings out there, then we should expect that there will be movies by Atheist writers out there too.  I don’t recall any secular groups threatening boycotts over Narnia.  All they did was avoid the movie.  I guess what I don’t understand is why go all out for boycotts and letter-writing campaigns?  Why not just say, “you know, that movie doesn’t jibe with my personal beliefs, I don’t think I’ll pay to see that?”  And even promote the avoidance of the movie to your followers, fine.  But leave it at that. 

And you know what?  You won’t get the backlash of raised interest in the movie due to the controversy.  Guess what?  I hadn’t heard of the movie until I saw that there was an outcry against it.  The movie studios probably are saving all sorts of money on advertising, by letting the evening news take care of promotions.  (Heck, that probably helps since there are no late night shows open for business with the writers’ strike in full effect.)

So, about a year or so ago, I decided to take on a personal project, to create a site that works sort of like sphere.com or techmeme.com, where you can go to the site and look for a subject, and keep track of news about it, and what people are saying about it.  It all started because I got tired of searching daily on Google News and Google Blog Search for info about my alma mater’s football team.

I had all sorts of cool ideas, and implemented as many as I could, and soon found that I was able to generate a bit of money through Google Adsense.  I will freely admit that I liked that extra income, as my income rarely exceeds my debt-payments.  So, I made my article gathering app more aggressive, and found that by pinging and tracking back to blogs, I could not only gain an audience directly from those links, but get ranked higher, also increasing my audience.

But that whole time, my main objective was still to build a site that would be useful to the people who visited it: that you could genuinely use it to track various subjects.  I had future plans to build RSS feeds (which, by the way, would link directly to the blog/news articles, not through my site, but directly to the original source), and my next revision was to have the capability to track any subject, but would still retain the core functionality of aggressively tracking some core topics.

Well, I’ve learned in the past few days, that my site is hated by many bloggers, and is seen as Blog Spam by many.  I have visited blog spam sites, and I certainly see where mine and there’s are similar, very similar.  Some key differences, I think, include that I link VERY CLEARLY and directly to the original article, I have changed it in the last month or so to attribute articles properly, and I’ve even throttled the gathering process to be somewhat less aggressive.  But in the last few days, I’ve seen that my site is so close to the blog spam sites I’ve visited, that I’m hard pressed to see any major differences.

So, I’ll be shutting it down soon.  I can’t shut it down immediately, because I have another site, a legitimate one where I provide the content, and the subject is fully aware and even participates in providing content to me, and that site uses articles I gather to update on that subject.  Oddly, I think that because the URL for that site is more appropriate for what it is, I’ve seen NO complaints about that one.

Once I’ve shut down the “blog spam” site, though, my goal to build a site that you can use to track subjects isn’t going to die.  I just am going to rethink some things.  Probably I will not gather any articles ahead of time, or at least not blogs.  As a user accesses a subject’s page, it will use AJAX calls to gather articles in real-time, will not store those en-masse, and will not have single “article landing pages,”  and finally, it won’t trackback/pingback.  (Honestly, that last part feels slightly like I’m being less up-front to the bloggers, but it seems that the trackbacks and pingbacks are largely responsible for the ill-will my site had generated.)

Anyway, I hope to have some sort of new site up and running in the first part of next year, and I will likely integrate this blog into that, so that I’m also providing original content to it. In the meanwhile, I’m sorry that my site became the poster-child of bad “netizenship” that it did, so I’ll do what I can to learn from this and be a better neighbor on the next go-around.

I think the fact that Virginia Tech got beaten by LSU (by something like a gajillion points) was argued a bit much, because that same LSU team lost to an unranked team a week ago!  ONE WEEK!  That doesn’t matter, but a loss to a #2 team at the beginning of the season, that’s a show stopper?

And what about poor Georgia?  Yeah, they didn’t win their conference, or even their division (they did play and win some games in conference, though, right?), but as their own coach pointed out (rather bitterly), that wasn’t a problem for all the people that voted them #4 a week ago.  Knowing how this season went, are you telling me that none of those voters had the thought in the back of their mind that maybe, just maybe, the top 2 might lose next week?  Have they not been watching?

Bottom line is that the BCS is a disaster, and this time out, a bunch of teams feel slighted now.  Does that matter?  Maybe not, but it sure makes the talking heads happy (you can tell they are happy, cause they sound and act so mad about how this played out).  Without this chaos, ESPN would have had to just talk about the 423 bowl games for 3 hours tonight, and what fun would that have been?  It’s much more fun hearing them fight for 3 hours.

My favorite candidate, assuming you asked, and assuming that by “favorite,” you mean, “Which candidate’s name do you think would easily be the silliest President’s name ever?” is Mike Huckabee.  Now, I don’t know too much about Mr. Huckabee, but I know this much: my 2 year old loves his name.  And if you can’t use that as an argument to vote for a dude, than what can you use?

Seriously, though; what basis do we have for judging such a huge group of candidates on?  Party affiliation?  Both parties are such a mess of corruption and stupidity that I can’t make myself lean solely on that.  And even if I did, that only cuts about 574 candidates.  (Cause at the last televised debate, there was like 125 “major” candidates, I think, right?  And each had to answer any question with a “true” or “false,” with no opportunity for follow-up.  Yes, THAT will help narrow it down!)

My solution is simple.  Make me king, and suck it, peasants!

So, admittedly, opening a new blog by telling people to go away is probably ill advised, but I figure I’ll set the tone of this blog early – I am a reasonably young man, but I tend to get grouchy about some things, so I’m assuming that one day, I’ll be that weird old man in the neighborhood that is known as “Old Man so-and-so,” who’s always yelling at the neighborhood kids for something.  My fist will be pumping, I’ll say my piece, then I’ll have to rest a bit from all the exertion.

So there it is, my first entry, and already I’m establishing myself as the great guy that you can’t help but love .  Deal with it.