The Insomniac Coder

"C'mon, what are these guys, stupid? It'll grow back. It does every month."

Would somebody care to explain to me how it came for me to daydream about this: Ferrari 599 GTO To actually shop around for something like this: Chevrolet Suburban And no, it has nothing to do with the money. And no, it has nothing to do with parenthood, two of the three sports cars I have owned were as a father (PJ was born while I was the owner of Miata #2), and the main reason for getting rid of my Miata was when my then new job dropped my weekly driving average from 300+ miles per week to less than 50 per month. We are talking daydreaming here, why would I just stop fantasizing about fast and dangerous cars and instead start shopping for a bigger SUV ?

What a Ferrari 458 Italia Car-BQ looks like

Image via Wikipedia That traffic is almost as bad as the DC Beltway . The article is a good read, notice how the locals didn't waste time making a bit of cash on the side by selling things to the stranded drivers, who are reportedly spending their time playing cards. Had that happened here in DC there would be cries of outrage because the traffic jam would violate our constitutional right to interstate commerce (it's true, you can't keep us from crossing state borders for business, it's in the friggin US Constitution ) and the news coverage would be the most irritating thing ever aired on TV in this country.  My worst encounter with the DC Beltway had to be Thanksgiving 1997. We decided to visit my ex-Army-boss and his family in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey . We left Thanksgiving Wednesday around 3 PM. It took us 4 hours to drive from Reston to the north junction of I495/I95, and over 4 more hours from there to Eatontown , NJ . Horrible doesn't begin to describ...

OK, I LOL'ed. 

I feel sorry for the poor bastard that has to dust off these books.

Image by pvera via Flickr This is idiocy. HBO would rather spend a fortune building their own streaming mechanism, and hold their audience hostage, than to spend less money licensing the same content to a much broader audience. All of this happens while it is almost impossible to go a full hour after a new HBO program airs without it being posted to bit torrents. Yes, as a norm any HBO series gets posted online within the hour of its first airing. But of course, HBO would rather be the only ones offering the streaming. Even worse, HBO already has been feeding their shows to Fancast , but only if the subscriber already has HBO. If they can put such a deal in place, why not do the same? Charge us whatever per month, and let us have the content through Netflix too. We all understand content costs money, but for what HBO charges per month having the content available as streamed media is a great value. What we are seeing here is an annoying lack of consistency. Otherwise HBO is ...