I have yet another 5 Gmail invitations to give away. Same drill, first five get them.

FOXNews reviews Fahrenheit 911. Here’s an example quote from the review. “It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.”

This review is interesting to me, kudos to FoxNews for being unbiased enough to give the film a good review despite all the partisan rhetoric that they are normally accused of spreading. For the last few weeks, but especially in the last few days, I have heard a litany of people either praising or trashing Michael Moore. They have had very strong opinions, one person even called him, in a room full of people at a party, a "piece of shit." Others have said things like, "I'm proud of him for standing up to the administration." The interesting thing about these people, and the difference between them and Fox, is that Roger Friedman actually saw the film before having an opinion about it. Everyone else seems to have purchased a "Jump to Conclusions" mat.

I have not seen the film. I may go see it in the theater, I will probably at least make an attempt to go see it. For all I know, I might walk out not so happy with Moore. However, one thing you will not read on bump.net tonight or any night until I see the film will be a review of a movie based on a guess.

The times in my life when I have had this "win at all costs" approach to an argument or issue, I may have won the argument more times than not. In every single one of these cases, without exception, I have paid the price for that approach. I could enumerate these mistakes here, but there is no point in exposing a litany of personal failures to make my point. We need to get to a healthier discourse. I would be interested in hearing others opinions about this, be they from the left, right, or moderates like myself.

I have three more gmail accounts to give away. Again, first come first served. Update: No more accounts to give out. Thanks.

A good friend took me to the yoga studio he belongs to, Yoga Samadhi, on Saturday. I was planning on returning today because the class felt fantastic. My body, on the other hand, had other plans for today. I can tell how out of balance my body has been from the soreness, and I guess that means I need the yoga that much more. I found the studio to be a warm, friendly, inviting environment, and reasonably priced. I don’t know too much about the various styles or schools of yoga, and I guess I will look into that subject this week. The studio I went to practices a sub-style of hatha yoga named Vinyasa. If you know anything about this stuff, I would love to hear about it.

Want a gmail account? I have some more invites to dispense. First come, first served.

If I had a copy of the new Beastie Boys CD, To the Five Boroughs, I would probably think that it was really good. Of course, since it hasn’t been released yet, I couldn’t possibly have a copy of it yet:-) Jason Zada also seems to have an opinion and stuff. Before writing anything about the cd, I listened to it five times, and I didn’t get tired of it.

It's a hip hop record. No instrumental goodness, no punk goodness, straight up, almost minimalistic, hip hop. The beats are mostly from the same school as Hello Nasty, the chop it up into loops and loop that sh*t up over and over, then throw some scratches on top of that, school. In some ways, after listening to the record the first time, I was thinking that I couldn't wait for the inevitable remixes to start dropping. Structurally, the vocal content would leave a remixer with a lot to work with. Overall, they didn't try to do too much with the beats, and it works just fine from where I stand. For those of you looking for the fourth major beat re-invention of the Beastie Boys, this is not that record. It is in some ways a couplet to Hello Nasty the way that Ill Communication was a couplet to Check Your Head.

As far as lyrics and rhyming goes, this record is different, very different, from what came before in a few ways. Although not as pervasive as I had feared, politics have crept into the lyrical content, and it gets especially bad in a couple of instances. I mean, to state the obvious, it is your record, and if that is what you want to talk about, be my guest. I, however, cringed a bit the first time I heard "It Takes Time to Build." There are some of the cultural references that we have come to rely on the Beastie Boys to provide, but the number is nowhere near what I had come to expect in the past. Stylistically, as hinted at by the first single, they branch out a bit more than they did on Hello Nasty. For instance, "Crawlspace" has Adrock laying down some different stuff. This I enjoyed quite a bit. One track that really stood out was "Rhyme the Rhyme Well" from both a beats and vocal standpoint.

Overall, I like this record quite a bit. I get the feeling, as with most of the Beasties work, that after another twenty-five listens, I will very attached to this record. It seems more subtle and minimalistic in some ways than the rest of their body of work, and while this might not bowl you over in the first couple of listens, it will undoubtedly insidiously creep into your consciousness and win you over.

Apple - AirPort Express Holy crap!!!

For those of you who have read Michael Lewis' excellent book on the Oakland A’s, Moneyball, Peter Gammons has written an excellent and very detailed 2004 MLB Draft Preview that goes beyond the normal “who will be selected when.” It talks about the philosophy that Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager has popularized, and the spread of that philosophy to the Boston, Los Angeles and Toronto franchises. He also talks a bit about the misconceptions that people who read the book may have come away with.

If you are a fan of Major League Baseball, you really owe it to yourself to read Moneyball. I can't recommend it highly enough. It is the second best book I have read this year, with only a Science Fiction novel, Cory Doctorow's well crafted Eastern Standard Tribe, beating it out to date. If you aren't a fan of sports, you will still enjoy Moneyball. I'm not certain that you will take quite as much away from the book in that case, but I still firmly believe that you will find it enjoyable.

It was an issue until we deployed Nigritude Ultramarine. After we deployed it, Nigritude Ultramarine solved all of our problems, including the oyster infestation.

On Monday, when my home was without power, I was forced to go to a local coffee shop to work on their Wifi network. How did I know when the power was back on and it was safe to go home. I pinged the router on my home network. When it responded, I knew the power was back on and it was safe to return home to finish my work.

Gawker Media Contract Publications is a weblog advertorial service from Gawker. Their first project is a month long Weblog for Nike. This is the point where Weblog business starts to sound quite a bit like the magazine publishing business to me.

Ben Forta spoke at our ACFUG meeting last night, which I partially sponsored. He mainly spoke about Blackstone, the next version of ColdFusion, and the state of the ColdFusion community. ColdFusion is apparently a thriving market, with quarter over quarter growth for the last nine fiscal quarters. Blackstone takes the next set of steps in merging some Flash technology into the ColdFusion platform where it makes sense, and also brings more reporting functionality to the table. I can’t tell you more than that without getting into trouble.

I sponsored the meeting because, in my eyes, I owe ACFUG quite a bit from a career perspective. I have made almost every single important career contact from the last six years of my life at or through ACFUG. My last three jobs have been either in part or completely as a result of my involvement in the organization.

So, I am finally somewhat back to normal after our weekend marathon of golf fun. Some thoughts that have gone through my head in the last twenty four hours, in no particulate order.

• People who purchase SUV's should first be sure that they are actually capable of driving an SUV
• The left lane is for faster traffic, it is the right lane that is for slower traffic.
• People who work in coffee shops are snarky sometimes.
• I like women, a lot.

Atlantans head eastward in search of community. I really like the neighborhood that I live in, and I think that East Atlanta hoods will continue to improve.

I’ve been working, since last Monday, on our site coverage and scoring of The 65th Annual Senior PGA Championship. It has been delayed, again and again, from Thursday to today, making it the longest tournament I have ever worked on in my year and a half of doing this golf web thing. For those of you who are not that familiar with competitive golf, tournaments typically end on Sunday, around 6 p.m. Yesterday, they were finishing up round three, which would normally happen on Saturday, and had just started the last round when the tornado sirens started to blow. This morning, I woke up to thunder storms here in Atlanta, and my home was without power, so I had to get in the car and find a Starbucks with power in order to work. The course, however, is underwater again after the rain last night.

Engadget has a post about a $50 iPod from Microsoft, and it is the tenth or eleventh post about this that I have seen come across my newsreader (NNW natch) in the last twenty four hours. I think that this is typical Microsoft. Announce really early, too early, and announce with ridiculous statements. A fifty dollar music player with iPod level storage and features? Not possible. It’s a typical tactic to cast doubts and fear on the marketplace. Good old MSFT, we can always count on her for the same tactics. Prediction: Their music service will suck ass. Their players will suck too, or at least not be as good as the iPod. They will lose tons of money trying to establish themselves, and attempt to leverage Windows to get more traction. In the end, they won’t be successful for the same reasons that Apple won’t. The labels control the industry, and they won’t let some distributor, no matter how big the company is, into their little piece of turf.

Update: Well, it turns out that the gentleman from Microsoft was misquoted. Well, I apologize for assuming the worst about Microsoft, I was wrong.

Atlanta’s On the Bricks Friday Night Concert Series starts tonight with Train and Liz Phair. I’m not terribly excited about either, and have worked something like 20 hours in the last two days already, but I thought I would point to the schedule anyway.

I notice that my Blogger profile is now on the first page of results when searching for meeting famous people and meeting aliens. I find this amusing. If I had my choice, I think I would rather meet famous people than meet aliens, assuming that the famous people were A-List.

The Yanks stayed hot this week, wrapping up a sweep of the Orioles last night with an 18-5 clubbing. Unfortunately, the Red Sox stayed hot as well, and the Yanks are half a game out of first. I really do have to get up to see a game soon. I wish that I didn’t live in a National League city, I should have thought that one through a bit more. Then again, my judgement in 1997 had to be somewhat impaired considering the company I was keeping at the time.

Years ago, I used to work at a comic book store for about a year. I mainly worked shows, and only worked in the actual store one day a week. As the years have passed, I had gotten out of the habit of reading comics. Recently, however, a friend turned me on to Wanted (link to a 5 page preview of the first book). This series, thus far, has rekindled what I used to love about reading comics. It is not a comic for kids, with mature themes.

Now I know where to go when I need some new bling bling.

iPodLibrary aims to put books on your iPod. I could never, ever, read an entire novel on my iPod’s tiny screen. I can read more than the amount of text that fits on the screen at once, and it would annoy me to have to keep scrolling to catch up.

I found The May 2004 issue of The Believer to be particularly good, especially David Ng’s piece on computer languages and computer books. It had me rolling on the floor laughing(ROTFL). I think, in some ways, that it is a shame that they don’t do more with the Web.

The Mac is a Harsh Mistress (via)

NSLog() discovered that Apple may be enabling third party apps in Software Update in Tiger. (via)