I am sending this letter to Ben Nelson and if you're a Nebraskan you should too.

Don't support the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act

I am writing to you today as a constituent and informing you that, should you support the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), I will push against your reelection in November.  The legislation is overly broad and violates the rights of every American, while failing to intelligently update the National Security Act of 1947.

The legislation would create an exception to privacy laws allowing companies to share private and personal data for “cyber security” reasons, but there aren’t restrictions as to who can use the information and how it can be used.  The language is overly broad and not focused enough on the purpose it claims to have.

Private communications and actions will be flowing from the private sector to government organizations like the NSA regardless of if they’re an actual threat or completely legal and benign.  This could lead to innocent individuals being targeted for doing nothing more than surfing the web, placing the wrong word in an email or text message, or searching for a phrase that someone, somewhere in the new chain of invisible recipients, might find threatening to their affairs. This bill is blatantly Draconian, and does not represent the interests of the vast majority of American citizens, let alone those whose interests you've vowed to serve.

The amount of data that would flow from private companies to the government would be immense, including innocent and private information.  Outside of cases for which there are already wiretap laws in place, the government has no need to know what websites I visit, or how many hours I play on my Xbox.

I reiterate that your support of this bill will in no way be a service to your constituents, that your support of it will be indication enough of your future inability (or unwillingness) to defend the freedoms of Nebraskans, and that a vote in favor of it will move me to vote against you in future elections, encouraging all of my friends to do the same.

Email Ben Nelson
Email Mike Johanns

The problem with Lincoln

I'm a typically closed-off individual. I don't like to directly explain what's happening in my life as much as I like to observe how I feel about those things. Okay, so maybe calling myself "closed-off" is a poor choice of words. I don't talk in great detail about the things people around me are doing. I don't gossip.

That's my general rule, at least.  Something happened last night, though, that sees me breaking that rule right now, because there's an important lesson to be had out of it.

Here's the scene: I was hanging out with my friend and we decided to go to the Q.  I had been talking with a guy named Jeremy online for a few weeks since the last time I was there and we decided it'd be nice to say hello in person, so that was an item on the agenda for this visit. The other item was to drink lots of cheap beer.  So, my friend and I arrived at the Q and got our Solo cups of the stuff, and began imbibing.  After a little of my drink, I went over to say hello to Jeremy, and I made my acquaintance with him and his friend Christina.  I didn't much know what to say, but we talked about how the drag show motif is really tired at this point, and how there should be karaoke at least some time at this place and it was a rather enjoyable, if short, chat.

What I didn't mention yet is that the ex was there, sitting just a couple seats away and keenly aware of the fact that I was talking to this guy (whom, as far as I know, he doesn't know).  After I went back to sit down with my friend, out of earshot, but with a direct line of sight back to where Jeremy was sitting, the ex took the liberty of walking up to Jeremy and pointing at me across the bar while expressing (with great emphasis on the word) that I'm crazy.

I found this to be, what they call in civilized culture, a total lame-ass below-the-belt dick move that only the most gargantuan of assholes would ever do.  But instead of relating that to my ex, I watched him sit back down, then went back over to Jeremy, shrugged, and told him that the gargantuan asshole and I used to date, and that he was still bitter about the way it ended.  Jeremy spoke to me again later in the night, and we laughed about it.

So here's the lesson I want to impart on you, the gentle reader: don't be a total dick and try to sabotage your ex's attempts to make new friends.  It's really not cool, and will probably get you blogged about.

So, I bought things...

I have been in the market for a new pair of headphones for a while now, because the in-ear buds I've been using cause me marked discomfort when I keep them in for any longer than an hour (raising concerns for the long-term health of my eardrums).  And then around the time of CES, Mashable released a story about a new company releasing headphones called "Aftershokz".  I really never trust a company with the in-your-face '90s attitude it takes to put a Z in the place of an S in their product line, but this time was different, because they promised a new method of delivering sound: bone conduction.  Being as excited as I am for things that make listening to my music a more enjoyable experience, I very quickly placed my pre-order.

But then, we're all naive sometimes.  The following is the review I tried posting on their site just now (they only allow for reviews of up to 1000 characters, and this was more than double that).

I remember these lollipop holders from when I was a kid.  They were called "Sound Bites".  They had four sound clips on them, and when you gently clamped your teeth around the candy part of the lollipop you could hear one of the sound clips in your head by pressing the button.

Of course, you could hear the sound clips even if you didn't have your teeth clamped on the candy, but when you did clamp your teeth down, the sound was of a noticeably higher fidelity and apparently louder than otherwise.  I remember even alternating from biting down and opening durning a sound clip to hear the difference, and being amazed at how different the clips sounded when I was biting down.

over a decade later, Aftershokz comes around, and I spend the most misplaced $70 of my life.

Claiming to use bone conduction technology to bypass the eardrum and channel noise directly to the wearer's inner ear, Aftershokz seem like the perfect solution to the layman who can't stand the discomfort or pain of listening to earbuds on even the lowest setting for more than an hour at a time.  I honestly thought, when I placed my preorder, that these would quickly replace my current set of earbuds.  Upon receiving them in the mail on Saturday, February 25, I tested them in multiple placements with several audio sources, and became immediately disheartened.

Positioning the speakers on the connecting point of my upper and lower mandible resulted in audio of completely abysmal fidelity.  Truthfully, listening to music through these headphones was akin to listening to music generated by the speaker on a Game Boy Advance or Nintendo DS.  Vocals were tinny and bass was practically nonexistent.  Listening to music through my iPhone's principal speaker generated both higher quality and louder tones *at a lower volume.*

Conceptually, bone conduction implies that, despite generating audible noise even when not pressed against a solid surface such as bone structure, sound volume and quality should increase when those conditions are met.  So, logically, pulling the speakers away from the sides of your head (and providing air space between the two) should cause a noticeable degradation of volume and fidelity.  Yet trying this on my own pair of headphones proved ineffectual.  In fact, sound quality improved not by placing the speakers against bone, but by bringing them back so that they were situated closer to my eardrums, which flies directly in the face of these headphones' selling point.

If you are in the market for a new pair of headphones, do not believe the hype surrounding these.  I have never been more immediately disappointed with a purchase in my life.

The Internet is for porn, and rabidly ganging up on individuals

I have an acquaintance from Twitter, who works for Zipper Interactive. He is a programmer there, and while I don't believe he worked on the SOCOM series, I know that he spent a lot of hours working on MAG. Despite being a programmer of video games, though, he told me on several occasions that he doesn't play them himself. That gives him one thing in common with Jennifer Hepler.

He, however, did not receive thousands of highly public messages calling him a fat cow, a cancer on the gaming industry, a slut, a whore, or a cunt, for joining Twitter over the weekend. Jennifer Hepler did.

I'm not going to rehash the details of this weekend's events here, as Googling her name will probably give you all the details you could ask for. What I will say is that this phenomenal outpouring of rage, vitriol, and malice makes me question humanity's worth as a species. For people to make such vicious personal attacks so relentlessly astounds me, and it is one instance of a growing number which make me wonder if people have ever been able to live peacefully with one another.

The relatively immediate future

I have a feed from Dice.com for jobs in various cities, the nearest of which being eight hours away from here.  I intend to begin seriously applying for available positions in a couple months.  I'm not looking for jobs right now because I still have four months of rent to pay on my apartment lease ($1700, give or take), but I figure breaking that lease for a new job in a better town wouldn't be as painful at the two-month mark, if the pay is good.

Odds are very low that I'll be staying in Lincoln once this lease is up.  It would be a nice change of pace to end up somewhere with cool people.

I ordered Roadrunner Internet earlier this week.  Windstream was pissing me off.

Remember Nigel Thornberry?

Now you'll never forget.

How SOPA can save us from migrant workers and mediocrity

***SARCASM AHEAD***

Okay, so, I was originally staunchly opposed to SOPA from hearing about how it could give copyright holders the power to force Internet providers to block access to websites with infringing content without due process.  I use a lot of knowledge and information in my attempts to sound smart, so I tend to like the free distribution of knowledge and information.  One thing leads to another and you end up with a Josh who really wants to keep SOPA and PIPA from passing.

Then, Wikipedia went down in protest of SOPA.  And Twitter exploded.  But it didn't explode in the fun way (where it looks all cool from far away and then candy starts raining down on everyone).  No.  It exploded in one of the most flagrant demonstrations of collective human stupidity ever.

If you're too tired to click the link (I understand.  You had a rough night), it is the Twitter feed of somebody who, for the whole of January 18, simply retweeted people's snippets of outrage, confusion, hopelessness, and despair over the fact that Wikipedia -- which seems to have been the only source of information these people had -- was down.  Some of them had no idea why it was down.  Some of them had no idea for how long it would be down.  Some of them thought it was down because of a law that Congress had already passed.  And some of them thought this law that was already passed was for the express purpose of taking down Wikipedia. I can only assume that these people are from a parallel universe where absolutely no thoughts can be expressed in more than 140 or 160 characters (depending on whether you're on Twitter or your cell phone), because Wikipedia's homepage curtly answered all of these questions.  I theorize this, because "history" is the last word you will read in the first 140 characters of that page.

The most depressing fact of this all is that Herpderpedia only chronicled 400 tweets.  I haven't scoured the list for repeat offenders, but assuming there aren't any, then this is just the voice of 400 Twitter users.  Imagine how many more there were on Twitter who went unheard, or how many there were who don't have Twitter accounts.

The existence of Herpderpedia proves that we are a nation with no shortage of complete idiots.  And yet, we have so many people who seem to be unable to find work, who are reportedly overqualified for menial tasks, and who go to school, wrongfully passing their classes by wide margins because of a broken school system that lets them believe they've succeeded at something, when they haven't done the slightest amount of actual work.

So I will posit this here: Maybe we're better off without Wikipedia.  Sure, it settles countless arguments about who wrote what and when and under the influence of which mistress/substance, but it also takes the legwork out of it.  Nobody is going to synthesize their own theories about, say, Brave New World if the most compelling arguments on it are handed out to anyone with wi-fi.  We learn the most when we have to pay attention to what it is we're seeing, and apparently Wikipedia is leading (or contributing, is the more likely case) to a system where people cease to tangentially absorb information and instead zero in on the facts that are presumed the most pertinent.

And in this sort of society, I think it's safe to say that nobody is truly learning anything.  So why treat them like they are?  Does anybody remember what we did with people who didn't learn things, back in the days before the Internet?  We had them repair our cars.  We bought our hamburgers from them.  They were the ones who grew crops.  And it worked!

So yeah, censoring the Internet may sound like a really scary thing to us, because we're smart enough to know that the Internet has a lot of meaningful uses, but if breaking down the Internet has the side effect of scraping all of this out of my educated workforce, I think it just might be doing something right.