I have done the unthinkable and installed iTunes.
Why? Because I'm saving for an iPod.
Why? Because my ancient Diamond Rio PMP300 is all but completely dead.
Why? Because out of 365 days, I probably use it 300 of those days.

I'm a music junkie.

But anyway... in my effort to prepare for that beautiful white 60GB Video iPod I've got my eye on, I've decided to go through my entire music collection and properly tag them all. I briefly scanned my harddrive with iTunes Library and it pulled up 4590 songs, with a playlength of 8 days, and a size of 8GB... and maybe 10% of them all are tagged.

I've already got four albums processed! Go me!

Hmm....

On opening day, the new Chronicles of Narnia movie gathered $23,006,856. Yet, also on opening day, the new King Kong movie (which easily had more media support than Narnia, said to be one of, (if not the) best movies of the year) only gathered $9,755,745.

No numbers for this weekend, yet, but current numbers bode well for the Christian-allegory fantasy series. I suppose it's too much to ask that Narnia always stay ahead of King Kong, though. But it would make a statement to the evil publishers that there really is money to be made by making good, healthy, family-friendly movies. (...and, no, I don't mean the creepy stuff Disney's animation studios are trying to pass off as family-friendly.)

Not that King Kong wasn't good, mind you. It was brilliant! But if I had to pick between one or the other, it'd be Narnia.

It's going to be difficult spelling out "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" all over the place, ya'know. I think I'm going to start abbreviating it as CoN:LWW, heh. I think that could work.

...by the way!

I just went through the entire list of Realms availible to World of Warcraft, checking for characters that I've forgotten about. Ahrotahntee members seem to keep dropping subtle hints about how many characters they have, as if that's somehow a status symbol. Well, if it is, then I think I take the cake. They think 10 is alot? Weeeeeell, I have 31 characters spread across 8 realms.

Do I play them all? Nope! Do they play all theirs? I doubt it.
But there you go. Just thought I'd mention it.

Maybe I'll release a list later. But right now, I'm off to prepare to leave to watch King Kong! We're going to try to hit the 4pm showing, so we're leaving at 2pm to get there early enough to get good seats! Yep... 2 hours.

A hearty thanks to Mister Witkowski for offering to host a small site for me again. Soooo... yup! Here I am. Back at good ol' www2.rivenwolf.net:808 (though you can still use www.rivenwolf.net if ya want).

So uhm... look at this: D&D Online Stress Beta Begins! I signed up and am currently waiting in the queue to download the gigantic client program. (Okay, so 1GB isn't too bad for an entire program.) They've decided to punish people or something and have banned all but paying subscribers of Fileplanet access to the standard hi-res client. So those of us who don't want to fund creepy, disgusting excuse for a file storage portal are left with a low-res client, whatever that means. The test only lasts a week, though. Oh well. Maybe I can win (haha) that "event" and get admission into the full Beta Test. ...and for those of you who may be worrying, no, I'm not buying it. World of Warcraft is more than enough MMOs to pay for.

The Gaming category of Slashdot must get more of the coolheaded commenters of that place. Lots of people whine and carry on about "no Linux version, waaaaah!!" and there's always at least one (shockingly high-modded) reply that puts them in their place. Saying, more or less, that Windows is the dominant gaming platform whether you like it or not. Linux is nowhere near popular enough for people to consider making a retail game for... and the users are wanting everything opensource and free, to boot. Not something developers want to do, understandably. I wouldn't work for 3 years on a game to just hand it up to everyone. If enough people made it clear that they'd purchase games made for Linux, then eventually developers might come around to actually doing it. But, right now, this isn't the time for it. Linux is too convoluted and non-standard. As in, so many possible configurations and drivers and such that it'd be an insane task to get your game working on all Linux distributions perfectly. With Windows, you pretty much just say "must have Windows XP!" and have done with it.

Anyway, that's my take on things. Linux != Gaming...yet. Heck, Linux doesn't even equal user friendly, yet. Work on that, first, and get a good healthy influx of people who will use Linux just because it's easy and then work on getting games over. Anyone who tells me that Mac and/or Linux is easier to use than Windows is a bit crazy. Sure, it might be for them... but try to see it from someone who just wants things to install and work without actually doing anything.

So yeah! I just turned this into a big ramble. Don't get me wrong, though. I like Linux. But it's not at all easy to learn, and it's not at all popular enough for games. It's slowly getting there, though, and that's cool.

So I downloaded the WoW patch to 1.8.4.

I know I've had some problems with free harddrive space lately, but I didn't know it was THIS bad. The patch needs 1GB to unpack and patch and then deflate again. Weeeeell, I only had 800MB free... and, in my book, freespace under 1GB is not good. Not good at all.

I remembered my WoW screenshots folder was rather large, last time I looked at it. So I decided to take a peek at it today. I have 405 screenshots saved in TGA format totaling, oh... let's just put it at 3GB. Erm... yeah. Needless to say, I decided to use the AMAZING IrfanView program to batch convert them aaaall to JPeg! (Yes! JPeg! PNG eww! Haha!) 3GB to 100MB with low loss.

Happy? You betcha.

http://www.noapathy.org/tracts/mythofseparation.html

I was going to look it up myself, but had trouble finding the right Article in the Constitution... so I searched Google for "seperation of church and state" and, naturally, found a trove of liberal "oh noes, religion!" groups. But then I found a shining light in the darkness.

I thought there was a real Article actually saying something about seperation. But, you know what? That phrase isn't even in a governing document. It was in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to a church to calm their fears about a government instituted religion. Not religion instituted government. They have it all so completely backwards.

What are they actually using from the Constitution? The first amendment... which says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Hey, wow, will ya look at that? "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Banning prayer in schools for being "unconstitutional" is unconstitutional. Banning using the name "Jesus Christ" in the General Assembly for being "unconstitutional" is unconstitutional.

People take and either knowingly misinterpret and play ignorance to the Constitution, or are just... well... misinformed, to be polite. Read it, people. Know what it says.

Please read the article I linked to... and read the US Constitution in it's entirety.

I though this merited a post all to it's own...

It was just announced today that Indiana has passed a bill to effectively prevent anyone from mentioning "Jesus Christ" in the General Assembly. Lots of people are incredibly, unspeakably upset.

Didn't we found the United States to escape the old English government from controlling our religion? You realize that the article in the Constitution that "seperates church from state" was designed to keep that from happening... not to keep religion from influencing the government. I think people know that, but they don't want that, so they're not going to see it that way.

How can you possibly ban people from saying something and still keep in line with "Freedom of Speech"? Which, I might not have to remind you, people are always quoting and don't want infringed upon at all, period, and if they THINK you're trying to censor them, they go ecstatic. So why can't Christians plead that and be heard?

You won't hear a bill be passed to keep people from talking about Allah in government meetings, I'll bet my bottom dollar. It's interesting how all these other religions are flourishing under the governments of the planet, but Christianity is the sole religion that's still persecuted to this day, in the era of "tolerance".

Coincidence? Nah... People are afraid of what Christianity means. That there's a higher power who controls anything and everything and that humans can't earn their right to get to Heaven, and that, one day, they're going to have to answer to Him. They want to be in control of their own life... they don't WANT someone in authority over them.

So there you go.