Watching The Screen Savers right now and a guest on the show, author George Gilder, just called the US a "3rd World Country" when it comes to technology, and more specifically when it comes to broadband. I founds a link to this artlic he wrote titled Making Broadband Bloom, here is snip:

South Korea has become the world-class broadband center that the United States should have been. It has a thriving tech stock market, a profitable telecom sector, and at least 20 times more per capita bandwidth than the United States. Americans pay about $40 a month for well less than 1 megabit per second. Koreans pay $25 a month for 6 to 8 megabits per second. In addition, for only slightly higher prices, Koreans already have 1 million very high-speed digital subscriber lines running at 13 to 20 megabits per second, and deployment of some 2 million new links of 50 megabits per second is planned for the next 12 months.

My desktop wouldn't boot into XP today. Kept getting a new blue screen (new to me, first time since switching to XP last year). Dell is shipping me a XP restore disc since apparently I lost the original, or they didn't include it with my desktop because it wasn't with the manual / others discs that came with my system. They are sending it overnight which is nice, I just wish that didn't mean Monday.

MediaChest is a new site that connects people interested in sharing their collection of books, CDs, DVDs, and games with others, and vice-versa borrowing from the community "chest" of media.

This is a decent idea, and I *should* have that opinion since there was a time when I considered starting this sort of site with some fellow co-workers of mine. The idea of course started small, just a few of us programmer sharing movies/video games amongst the small group. The idea grew, we thought of opening a company intranet expanding the reach to over 100 people. The idea grew bigger, making a web site that neighboring companies would be offered to join. The idea went no where, well... it went bye bye.

I know one thing that worried me about starting such a project is that of course there is high potential to get items stolen from strangers. When the idea was small, open to a tight group of people that interact on a daily basis, or even slightly larger, people within an organization, you are less likely to have peoples due to a mutual respect. As an operator of a web site promoting loaning your personal belonging to strangers, I would feel personally responsible for lost goods.

I have to give credit to the precursor to the idea, at least for me, Booklend started in March of 2001 by Mark And(erson). I remember the first time I saw his site and his book lending project (back then it didn't have its own domain name), it was brilliant and crazy all rolled into one.

While Mark's been successful with Booklend and people being honest, I honestly don't see MediaChest sharing the same fate. Too bad.
[ via Metapop ]

Two things: 1) I guess it's really easy to see if a Pepsi bottle is not a winner before making your purchase. [ via FARK ] and 2) I guess the girl in the Pepsi ad was never prosecuted, I guess no one was. What? Misleading advertising?

According to this report on CommanderBond.com, Pierce Brosnan will not return to reprise the role of Jame Bond in the 21st Bond film. The report doesn't cite the specific reason for Brosnan not returning, but I think it might be related to all the injuries he has received during the filming of the past four movies:

Brosnan himself was injured in each of the films he made, hurting his back in the final fight sequence of Goldeneye, having his face cut open in Tomorrow Never Dies, getting burned in the back while filming The World Is Not Enough, and most famously, hurting his knee while filming the hovercraft sequence in Die Another Day.

[ via FARK ]

UPDATE 2/14: What? Something mis-reported on the internet? Appears that Brosnan will be back.

Directly from the press release: "The Mozilla Foundation today announced the immediate availability of a new preview release of its next generation web browser, Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla Firefox 0.8 represents the bleeding edge of Internet technology and raises the bar for ease of use, performance, robustness and standards compliance." Note the namechange from Firebird to Firefox. Also released is an updated Mozilla mail client, version 0.5 of Thunderbird.

Download links:
Firefox 0.8
Thunderbird 0.5
Select your own mirror
or use a BitTorrent found on Slashdot

I also added a "Get Firefox" button to my site. More banners can be found on the Firefox ad campaign page. I seriously love Firebird^C^C^C^Cfox. And thankful to Joel for turning me on to Mozilla in the first place. I can't stress enough how much better browsing the web is with Mozilla/Firefox than with Internet Explorer. Go ahead and read Neil's 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.

Update 2/11: While browsing I ran into the blog of John Hicks, the graphic artist who is responsible for the new Firefox logo, he has an entry about the design process behind the logo. [ via Kitta.net ]

The bug report says that the windows installer will delete all the contents of your Program Files folder. Big no no if you didn't know. This makes me NEVER want to install a nightly build of any product.... at least not the 1st person to install it.

So yesterday when I went to the DMV to get a new drivers license I brought my expired CA drivers license, my passport, bill showing my current address, and my birth certificate. Well... as she was entering the information in, she noticed that my birth certificate had my name spelt incorrectly with a "C" (Eric). She said that the birth certificate trumps all other documents, and that she was forced to issue me a drivers license with my name spelt as it was on the birth certificate.

The lady helping me also said that this happens all the time with younger kids getting their licenses for the 1st time. Their parents never noticed that the birth certifcate didn't have the correct spelling, or that they never bothered to file a correction. So now I have to file the correction for myself, and then pay the fee to get a new drivers license issued. Yesterday I was paranoid that a cashier was going to deny me from being able to use my credit card because the name didn't match my ID. Luckily the two times I used it the clerk didn't notice (or care). But next time I may not be so lucky. Thanks mom and dad.

Those of you trying to visit my blog at it's original URL of http://ekosm.com/blog/* might notice that not only does my blog look different, but I have also changed it's name and location to errorik.com. Ekosm.com was originally indended to only be used for my personal web development projects, not to be a blog. But when I first put up a blog I didn't think it was worth registering a new domain, but now years later I want to clean up Ekosm.com and use it for it's indended purpose, so I have moved my blog here.

Slowly revealing myself - In the beginning of my blog I had no intention of even mentioning my real name. For a some reason or other I took a stance to remain personally disconnected with my blog, even though I was writing sometimes about very personal things in my life. However, I couldn't help it when others were linking to my site and referring to me by name. So now with moving my blog to errorik.com I am official taking a stand that it is OK for people to know my name. "Hi, I'm Erik." And even further I have included rotating photos of myself in the top-left corner of the site... big difference then I originally planned. I will still keep very private confessions/rants for group hug (sometimes you gotta remain anonymous)

My life is in digital disarray - I have a lot of organization to get done. Photos, artwork, data I have collected. I have big ideas and intentions, but usually fall short. I have like 4 or 5 personal projects that are just totally incomplete, or not even off the ground. I guess it's a sign that work is going good and I am busy. Right?

The question... - Will errorik be a better, more maintained blog than ekosm? I doubt it, but who knows.

If you missed seeing this Pepsi/Apple ad yesterday during the Superbowl, the new joint promotion between Pepsi and the Apple iTunes music store is that 1 in 3 Pepsi bottle caps has a code that you can use in the iTunes music store to download one free song.

About the Ad

Its decent ad, features a collection of "young" people who the RIAA has filed lawsuits against for downloading music. In the ad a girl claims "we're still going to download music free off the internet". The music for the ad has lyrics saying "I fought the law and the law won". And text that reads: "STARTING TODAY, PEPSI & iTunes WILL GIVE AWAY 100 MILLION FREE SONGS... LEGALLY".

About the Promotion

There's only one type of person that will be redeeming these bottle caps: Pepsi drinker + iTunes user. For Pepsi drinkers alone, they will just throw the bottle caps away. And for iTunes users alone, you will have to change your drinking preferences, at least until the promotion ends. And for everyone else (and I fall into this category), we would have to change both how we download/organize/play our music and what we drink. Even though the odds of getting a winning bottle cap are pretty good, I probably wont do this.

About Recycling your iTunes Bottle Caps

iTunes pays musicians for every song downloaded, so Apple/Pepsi can't really just give away songs without making sure the Labels/Artists are paid for the download. Rumors are that Pepsi is fronting the bill, probably due to that Pepsi plans for 80-90% of the bottle caps to go unredeemed.

Enter TuneRecycler.com. If you happen to fall into the category of you drink Pepsi, but don't use iTunes, you can donate your codes to the site, and they will use the codes to support "independent music". I like the idea of some project out there trying to support independent artist on-line. So props to this site.