Telling it like it is

Utah's liquor laws have to change. I was never a big social drinker before we moved here, but Utah has painted me into a near alcohol-free corner with it's stupid 'private club for members' laws. Basically, you can't just walk in somewhere and have a drink. You have to buy a membership first. But to get a membership, you have to know someone else who has to introduce you. In other words, it's 99.9% impossible to have an impulse drink. I don't understand how any of these places make any money, and when the topic of killing off the membership law comes up, all the owners are all up in arms telling anyone who'll listen that they'll lose business because of it. Hmm. No. Repeal the membership law, and ban smoking, and I'll come in and have a drink. So will tons of other people who'd never considered it before. But for as long as this freakish liquor law stands, I refuse to pay $69 a year for a "membership" ($4 every 3 week for each bar

Well it had to happen. Target are the first store to stop selling Sony's UMD discs for the PSP. By the end of the month, I suspect BestBuy will be doing the same. Of course we all saw this coming because Sony flat refused to make a UMD burner available. No burner, means no third party, means dead format. I'm amazed that with all the history of failed media types, Sony still haven't learned that lesson :(

We watched the season finale of Doctor Who last night and they finally wrote Rose Tyler out of the show. They changed Doctors on us after the first series and now they've gotten rid of the other key character. I'm not sure that's a clever thing for the old Beeb to have done. I could be wrong. They were happily salvaging Doctor Who from the old days of nauseatingly long story lines and changing characters, and now it looks like they've fallen off the wagon. I don't know why they've done it either. The new series has been winning award after award and rave reviews. Changing both lead characters seems like the sort of moronic thing a US network would do. We'll have to see how it pans out later in the year but I'm not holding high hopes for the next season :-( Still - she's trapped on a parellel earth, so if the new assistant sucks donkey balls, I guess they can write her back in. There's a faint glimmer of hope.

Wow. Talk about not learning your lesson. Microsoft's X-Box team are working on Argo - their supposed iPod-killer. This would be less laughable if so many other products hadn't failed to take the iPod crown. It would be less laughable if any division other than the goons responsible for the X-box were working on it. After all - look at the - erm - "resounding success" of the X-box and X-box 360 (neither of which have outsold any of their competition). When you look at the pictures of the Argo, you realise instantly that it's going to be a PDA that runs Windows Mobile. Hence the gigantic, power-sapping screen. That means the battery life is going to suck, the interface is going to suck and the product is going to suck. Windows mobile is slow, bloatware. My current "top of the line" PDA running WM is easily slower and more cumbersome than my wife's dinky little $99 palm. Microsoft are going to make the same mistake they always do. They're going t

It's good to be an Atheist :-) Check out the Big Religion Chart. Man some of those people are screwed up. No wonder so many people are at war. I mean look at Scientology. Eesh! We're also pretty well represented in the grand scheme of things. The count, according to that chart, is: christianity : 2bn islam : 1.3bn atheist : 1.1bn So there are more atheists than people who believe in any religion other than christianity and islam. Sweet. Now if only the top two would stop fighting with each other and shouting "my God is better than yours" I'm sure the world would be significantly more peaceful.

Thank god. The world cup is over for another 4 years. Can we get back to normal now please? I wasn't expecting much impact given that America doesn't play football, but it was starting to get like American football or basketball it was interrupting TV and media schedules so badly. Eesh. It's a frickin' game, people. The outcome doesn't matter.