news [spugbrap’s blog]

April 19th, 2007

Ding, dong, the witch is dead!

Okay, time to come clean. I’ve been watching American Idol this season. This was supposed to be my ‘off’ season — I’ve consistently watched only every other season of that show. But Lacey had to keep showing me “just a couple of the really good performances”, and before I knew it, I cared. Not enough to vote, as I have on some previous seasons. But enough to watch every damn episode since. Oof.

I thought about blogging about it back when I first got into it, but didn’t get around to it. When Lacey and I honestly couldn’t tell whether Sanjaya Malakar was male or female during one of his early performances (I think this might be it), I almost blogged about that, but didn’t get around to it. Later, I felt like saying something about the girl who was bawling during Sanjaya’s peformance, but again, didn’t get around to it. Now, Sanjaya is finally gone, and I just wanted to publicly express my relief that America finally woke up from its collective drunken stupor, and voted him off.

It does take a little bit of the controversy out of the show, and now there’s nobody left that I sincerely want voted off, but I’ll still keep watching till the end. I’ll probably even vote next week, with their whole “Idol Gives Back” or whatever (votes ==> charitable contributions). I expect Melinda Doolittle or Jordin Sparks to win the competition, but based on how long Sanjaya managed to stay on the show, it’s really up in the air.

Anyways, I doubt I’ll post anything more on this subject. Now, let the finger-pointing and name-calling begin, since I publicly admitted to watching/being into this show. For the record, I will watch “So You Think You Can Dance” when it comes on again, as well. Guilty pleasures, I guess. I’ll probably blog about it once, since I never got around to it last year.

October 9th, 2006

Trying out wordpress

I recently started a new blog at http://spugbrap.wordpress.com, which may replace both of my blogger.com blogs soon. I’m trying out wordpress, comparing it with the new blogger beta, and will decide from there.

At this point, I will probably be posting all new entries over there, so you may want to go ahead and subscribe to it via the Entries feed, and possibly the Comments feed. I may cross-post a little bit, for the sake of comparing blogger beta vs. wordpress, but the wordpress one will be my primary outlet for all things geeky/personal/both (sometimes it’s hard to draw the line).

October 7th, 2006

spugbrap’s new blog

This may become the new home for my blogging, consolidating my personal and geek blogs into this one place. I’m finding that I’m not writing as often as I’d like to, and without heavy posting volume, there’s really no point in separating the geek and personal blogs.

My intention was to keep the geek one focused on just reusable tips/tricks/scripts/etc., but with categories (aka tags, labels, keywords, etc), people can simply search this blog for the category ‘geek’ or something.

Anyways, we’ll see how this goes. For now, the old blogs are still up on blogger, and I may still post on them until I decide for sure what I’m doing. I’m going to play around with wordpress a bit, though, and see if I like it better than the new blogger beta.

Eventually, I may end up hosting it myself, or at least making http://www.spugbrap.com point to it or something. For now, that just points at my family website (http://www.oatmealcookies.org), which is where all my pictures get posted (resized) automatically when I download them from my digital camera. One of these days, I will get all those pictures organized with some sort of tagging system.. I haven’t decided what, yet, so they’re just organized into folders by the date they were taken.

June 23rd, 2006

New Futurama episodes coming!

Saw this on slashdot this morning:

“Good news everyone! Straight from a one-eyed alien’s mouth - 13 new episodes of Futurama have been confirmed by Katey Sagal on Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show. All the original actors have signed up too.”

Apparently there are 13 new episodes coming to Comedy Central in 2008. Nice to see another one of my favorite shows come back from cancellation!

April 28th, 2006

Dictionaries are considered evidence in death penalty trials?

From an article on Wired News:

The judge in Zacarias Moussaoui’s death penalty trial admonished the jury Friday to avoid dictionaries after learning a juror looked up the meaning of “aggravating.”
[…]
Deliberations halted briefly Friday after the court learned that a juror had turned to a dictionary _ which U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema had refused to supply the jury earlier in the week when asked.[…]
[…]
Earlier in the week, Brinkema denied the jury’s request for a dictionary, saying that to supply them would be like placing extraneous evidence in jury room.

Wow.. So a dictionary is evidence in a death penalty trial?

What if a juror is not the most educated, or they’re ESL?
It seems to me that a dictionary is one of the few resources they SHOULD have available to them.

I can understand not allowing jurors to watch the news, read a magazine, Google search, etc. But from what I’ve seen (mostly TV/movies) of legal/courtroom stuff, lawyers (when addressing the jury) seem to often say things like “[SomeEvilCrime] is defined as …”, since precise wording and language is extremely important in legal proceedings.

In the judge’s defense, she did verbally provide a definition of “aggravating” to the jury, and apparently the jury’s instructions already included a definition for “aggravating factors”, and the juror should not have used a dictionary after specifically having been told not to.

It just seems silly that a dictionary could be considered “extraneous evidence” in a death penalty trial (unless that dictionary had been used as a weapon to kill someone (some editions are awfully big and heavy!)).

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