JeffSay…

I was just on a site and noticed an ad for eBay auctions of iTunes Music Cards.

When I buy a $15 gift card at the store, I pay $15 for it. There are no taxes or anything else. Why on Earth would anyone pay anything more than that for one? I just don’t get it.

SciFi had it good, great even. Their Friday night line-up was superb. It was even worthy of staying in and not having “fun” with friends but they went and fucked it up. Now what happened? Ratings have declined for their biggest shows: Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate SG-1. So much so that they’ve canceled SG-1 and have yet to renew BSG for a fourth season.

Battlestar Galactica moves to Sunday nights starting January 21 at 10 p.m. on the SCI FI Channel to finish its third season. There is no confirmation on a fourth season pick-up yet.

Should Galactica’s ratings continue to erode, the highly acclaimed series may be discontinued….

I’m not sure what they were thinking. With the previous Friday night line-up, all three shows had good ratings. Now they’ve put the kibosh on SG-1 and might kill off Galactica. When SciFi split up the Stargates and BSG, ratings declined for both. It was a bad idea plain and simple.

I was just looking through a copy of Esquire from this past September when I noticed something that perplexed me: the table of contents wasn’t until page 45. That just strikes me as weird. Also, the forty-four preceding pages weren’t numbered. Of course this is because they’re advertising pages, but it still intrigued/irked me.

Another thing that bothered me was how cluttered the cover was, so much so that it’s almost hard to read. I understand needing to give the potential buyer a clue as to what’s inside from just the cover, but this is a bit overboard.

Think Progress has posted the text of Bush’s State of the Union early. There are a few things that made me think.

The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies and share in the rights of all humanity. And I say, for the sake of our own security … we must.

Our goal is a democratic Iraq that upholds the rule of law, respects the rights of its people….

He talks a nice line about respecting human—and presumably civil—rights in Iraq, but it’d be nice if he did the same here in America and withdrew his and his party’s support for writing discrimination into the constitutions of so many states.

He also mentioned Darfur:

And we will continue to speak out for the cause of freedom in places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma — and continue to awaken the conscience of the world to save the people of Darfur.

emphasis added

He wants to “awaken the conscience” to stop genocide in Darfur without calling it genocide, of course. If he did that, he’d actually have to do something about it rather then just talk. A friend pointed me towards an article in The New York Times from January 17 called “What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy”.

According to the author, the war in Iraq will wind up costing about $1.2 Trillion. If we hadn’t entered into the Iraq debacle, we could have actually completely paid for a military intervention in Darfur, along with many other much-needed programs.

Think Progress » Embargoed: State of the Union Text

The title pretty much says it. I want tabs in the iTunes Store browser. It’s essentially a web browser embedded into iTunes so why can’t (or won’t) they do it. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve Command-clicked because I forgot that I was in iTunes and wanted to open a link in a new tab so I could avoid having to click the back button so often.

So I want tabs in the iTunes browser.

I was looking up lyrics to “Slumber My Darling” (iTunes) by Alison Krauss, Edgar Meyer, Mark O’Connor, & Yo-Yo Ma so I popped “Slumber My Darling” into Google and the first result was Lyrics007.com.

Now’s when the oddity occurs: In the “Fans who visit this lyrics also like” section, it listed artists like Ginuwine, Destiny’s Child, and Slipknot. Slipknot! What the hell?

I had a little run-in with my friend’s mailbox tonight. Upon leaving her house at shortly before 3:00 AM, I tripped and slammed into her mailbox. It’s an old mailbox on an old mailbox post. It’s been there forever and seems to have rotted away. When I tripped, not only did I scuff my shoes (bitch!), but I hit it with my shoulder and it promptly fell forward and landed on the ground. I proceeded to keep falling, though and landed on the ground scuffing my knee up pretty well.

It was a good night, though, overall. We went to see some friends and played Dirty Minds for a little while. Then we found a copy of Maxim which tickled us to no end since these friends are gay and had no real interest in the magazine but are for some reason subscribed for it—for two years.

Also of note is a blog entry about how mean Randy, Paula, and Simon are on this season’s American Idol. I’ve only watched about 30 minutes of the episodes so far and the performers from Seattle were especially bad, so much so that I didn’t even finish watching a full episode, but the comments from the judges seem to be even more…bitchy? than in previous years. They’re no longer humorous in their criticism, they’re just plain mean.

Someone I talked to over dinner at the diner last night said the judges’ behavior on this season’s ‘American Idol’ was like watching the varsity team make fun of how kids in the Special Olympics play sports. I totally agree, except I think the varsity team is probably nicer.

What will it take for ‘American Idol’ to stop the madness — some pimple-faced kid committing suicide because Randy, Paula and Simon got an entire TV nation to laugh at him/her? It would be good if we could show some outrage before it comes to that.

Worth Repeating: ‘Idol’ Judges: Real-Life ‘Mean Girls’

Tonight’s Special Guest Star was Tori Spelling. She kept popping up everywhere. She was in a movie that we saw at Blockbuster, then she popped up in Scream 2 in the movie within the movie and she was brought up again at dinner when the movie Trick because someone mentioned something burning in their eye….

The big news going around the Mac web right now is the teaser that Apple’s thrown up on its website telling viewers that “The first 30 years were just the beginning.” Strange as it seems, any little hint from Apple sends every Mac nerd into a tizzy, myself included.

What I found truly interesting, though, was the highlighted bit at the bottom about redeeming gift cards. It reads, “Redeem iTunes Gift Cards (iTunes 7 required)”. I’m a big fan of iTunes–as long as it’s on the Mac. The Windows version is a utter P.O.S. I don’t like the idea of forcing Windows users to upgrade to the bug-ridden, resource-hogging iTunes 7.x if they want to redeem their iTunes Gift Cards.

When iTunes 7 came out, I immediately upgraded my Windows box so I could have all the niftiness, ugly UI aside. Shortly after, though, I found myself despising it. I couldn’t even browse the Web while iTunes was playing without causing stutters in the playback and freezes in Firefox. I downgraded back to iTunes 6.0.5, thanks to a nice tutorial.

When the 7.0.2 upgrade came out a few months ago, I again jumped on it hoping that it would solve the issues affecting my machine. It didn’t. I thought that the problem had gone away, but it hadn’t. It returned shortly and was just as infuriating as ever.

“Boo!” on you, Apple, for forcing people to use the crappy version of iTunes if they want to redeem their gift cards.