Garbage.net – My Blog, My Life

The new Dresden Dolls album “Yes, Virginia” has been leaked online about 2 months before the scheduled release date. In response to the leak, Amanda Palmer said the following:

“one of the reasons we consider ourselves so lucky is that you guys ARE such a loyal fanbase that we don’t need to worry about y’all downloading our album and not going out to buy the record. we know you all will. as far as what you do with your free time on the internet, itis your choice. we take the stance we do with everything else: be free and do what you want to do. we cannot stop the future, but we can communicate with you the fact that if you don’t buy the physical disc, you will be a) hurting the band financially and b) missing out on the album artwork, which i personally consider part of the album itself – not some random add-on.”

After listening to the whole thing I can tell you it kicks ass and you’ll definitely enjoy it if you enjoyed their first album. If you don’t enjoy their first album then there is something seriously wrong and you should seek medical attention. So go buy the album when it’s released and go check them out on tour. They are currently doing European dates and should be back in the U.S. around late summer.

The Winter Olympics are over. I did my usual 40 hours of Curling watching thanks to the magic of Tivo. If you feel like TV doesn’t control your existance, give Tivo a try. You’ll be saying “Sorry, I can’t go out with you this or next weekend, I have 35 hours of curling to watch.” in no time. Trust me, girls think that’s HOT.

Speaking of HOT, Cassie Johnson was the skip for the U.S. female’s curling team. She’s mostly at fault for my extensive curling watching this year. Other than Cassie though, curling is a pretty cool sport. Most people don’t “get it” and think it’s retarded but once you get to know the sport (and the hot women that play it) you’ll learn to appreciate it more. If you want to learn more about curling, visit the curling entry at Wikipedia. Then maybe you’ll know what to do when a girl is screaming “YEP! YEP! HARD! HARD! HARD!” from accross the ice.

Oh yes, I almost forgot to talk about Lindsey “Method Air” Jacobellis. Lindsey was leading the snowboardcross race by about 5 seconds when the decides to do a “method air” on the next to last jump of the race. Lindsey managed to pull off a lovely “method air” and then completely fell on her “method ass” shortly after landing. It cost her the gold medal but she did gain a world of embarassment. USA! USA! USA!

So a few weeks ago I was upgrading my version of Acrobat Reader. I start the installer, wait a couple of seconds and am greeted with the message “Netopsystems FEAD Optimizer is now recomposing data for setup program”. After a few seconds of confusion wondering WTF is this thing recomposing and WTF is “Netopsystems FEAD Optimizer” I decided to do a little research.

Turns out Netopsystems is a German based company that specializes in data distribution. Besides a catchy name that just rolls off the tongue they offer a variety of other amusing solutions. Besides the FEAD Optimizer, they also offer the FEED Optimizer. Who is the braniac that names 2 different products from the same company a name that sounds the same? I can see a conversation going like this: “Hello, this Heather at Netopsystems, would you like more information regarding our FEAD Optimizer or the new and improved FEED Optimizer?”

Netopsystems also managed to register the word get with their new get® solution. So please be aware the next time you use “get” since you might have to pay some royalties. A closer look at their BLD solution tells us that “Downloading voluminous files can take quite a long time, especially with a modem connection and also when broadband-connected.” Who the hell uses voluminous to describe files? At least they offer very easy to follow graphs like the one below to explain exactly how FEAD Optimizer (not FEED) works. I’ve been looking at it for the last 10 minutes and I still don’t get it. If you do, drop me a comment.