Etc - Bathroom Breaks and Whatnot

Exciting title, but likely appropriate. I blame Tall Brad for making me read a Robbins book - I'm in an all sorts of rambling mood lately. In order, in this post you will find the following (just hop between paragraphs - I'm going to assume my readers can count):

• Our President has to Poop
• iPod CD Capturing Bites
• Katrina Joke du Jour
• Terry Pratchett Comes to Television
• Text Adventure Hamlet

First off, go see Mean Mr. Mustard or Boing Boing and appreciate the fact that our commander in chief finds it necessary to ask his Secretary of State if it's ok to take a potty break - something just shy of raising his hand in class to ask permission. Does he deserve so much mocking? Probably not - after all, everyone has had a fairly stupid question they were forced to ask someone else at work, particularly about protocol or social ettiquette in a social situation. You just can't keep all of that stuff in your head. My company has a mentoring program for first year programmers for just that reason, so they can ask the stupid questions rather than sit in silence for fear of asking a manager or someone with power over their promotion. Then again, they aren't the President of the United States (who doesn't have anyone in charge of his promotion), and they haven't seemingly bungled not one, but two, life-and-death, national emergencies with indecision and hestitation, which makes it ironic, which means he's certainly open for the (not so) odd jibe. Has anyone considered that he might have been asking Condi about the bathroom because he didn't know where it was and he saw the piece of toilet paper stuck to her expensive, Katrina-shopping spree shoes.

On a completely different thread, I've decided all of you that have owned iPods for some time now are really screwed up. I finally bought Pooteewheet an iPod and then set about trying to import all of our CDs onto the thing. At first Pooteewheet was doing individual songs until I pointed out you didn't have to sync all of them, so why not record the whole CD. Well, I have every CD I've owned since my first CD and CD player in 1987 (my friend Dan actually bought me my first CD before I had a CD player - Aerosmith if you must know), I've never sold any of them, and my wife has a hefty collection she's amassed since then. I know there are people with thousands of CDs, but I feel my collection of what seems to be over 500 is sufficiently insurmountable from a copying standpoint. I didn't have to waste this much time before technology, I just shoved anything I was unlikely to listen to into a box, tucked it in the closet, and forgot it existed. It wasn't until the iPod that I even had an idea that I owned 4-5 Eric Clapton CDs - I was pretty sure I owned just one, and that one by accident because I bought it from an old manager that had scored two and was trying to unload. On the other hand, it's been a long time since I've had a good chance to listen to my collection of bagpiping tunes.

I found this to be horribly sick and simultaneously funny:
Xeni Jardin:
Q: What's George Bush's position on Roe v. Wade?
A: He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans.

For all of you that come to my site looking for the odd news about Terry Pratchett, this might excite you:
The BBC has announced that it is adapting Terry Pratchett's brilliant kids book Johnny and the Bomb (part of the Johnny Maxwell trilogy, which includes Only You can Save Mankind and Johnny and the Dead) for TV. The Johnny Maxwell books deal with the fantastic adventures of three pre-teen Brit kids who travel through time and dimensions having advetures that are pure Pratchett: funny and humanistic at the same time.

And finally, one more Boing Boing link. It is a fact that when I first involved myself in computer games, they were text based. Ah, the days when my little brother owned a copy of Leather Goddess of Phobos and we felt liberated that we could pull one over on my parents by adventuring in the most salacious setting, and then tell on each other for doing just that. Truly a bonding moment for the NodtoNothing Brothers. BoingBoing links to a copy of a text adventure based on Hamlet (and other Shakespeare characters). Some advice, don't mock/attack Othello - he's just as pissy as he is in literature, although he might be my particular choice for executioner.