Ammon Brown
Ammon Brown's Humble Blog

So I was browsing through channels the other day and came across a marathon of the show Jericho on Universal HD. I dig this channel because it shows unedited movies in full aspect ratio as well as a pretty darn good selection of rerun shows in HD. I decided to record the entire first season of the show (gotta love DVR!) and watched 8-9 episodes over the weekend. I must say, it is an enjoyable show even if Skeet Ulrich has always seemed a bit sallow in a heroin-junkie kind of way. Of course, I have always had an affinity for post-apocalyptic dramas ever since reading Stephen King’s The Stand and watching the Mad Max trilogy as a kid. I got to reading about the show and found that it had been canceled and then re-born after fans sent over 20 tons of nuts (according to Wikipedia) to CBS, a reference made in the show to General Anthony McAuliffe’s message to the Germans at the battle of Bastogne. I guess when a TV network receives 20 tons of nuts (a lot of it from Nuts Online) it lights a fire under them.

However, CBS has said that they will air a few more episodes starting Feb. 12, 2008, but will likely re-cancel the show if it does not garner good viewership numbers. So go to the show’s site, catch up on episodes online, and start watching! It is pretty good stuff, even if it feels a bit contrived from time to time.

This whole campaign got me thinking about the power of the internet, too. Does the internet provide a much more interactive link between viewers and content providers, allowing the viewers to be heard in a more meaningful way than through raw viewership statistics? Or does the internet allow a vocal minority to skew the perception of the content providers, making them appear to have a much larger audience than they actually do? Is the internet an instrument of raw democracy or is it a squeaky wheel special interest group purporting to speak for the masses? Discuss.

Yes, it is true. We closed on our apartment yesterday, so we now own a home! Well, the bank owns the majority of it. Yesterday was a bit of a nutty day, we had errands to run in the morning and I got a call from our current landlord. He was upset that we were moving out so late in the month (a month we paid for) and yelled at me for wanting to leave food in the fridge and and our cat in the apartment until after the closing, which was at 2. It turns out that he had promised the new tenants that they could move in early. When we said our closing was at 2, he assumed that we would be out by then. As a result, we threw away all of our food and took the cat to our closing. It was pretty amusing, as we were both dressed like crap and had a cat in tow while everyone else was wearing suits. We were also a half hour late due to traffic, but we figured they would wait for the people who came bearing the big check.

As it was, we moved in last night, after having been homeless for about two hours. The apartment is awesome, as you can see from the pictures. It is in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn and is 1/2 a block from the F train, a huge plus in NYC. As it is, we are living amidst a sea of boxes and we’re expecting our furniture to come trickling in throughout the next month. It is nice to no longer be paying rent, but it sucks that I may wind up suing yet another landlord who has decided to disregard the law and withhold my security deposit. I’ll keep you posted on that front.

I am peeved. I am peeved that when you do a search for “Ammon Brown” you get the dot net version of my name. That just ain’t right! The problem is that Jared linked to my other site using Ammon Brown as the anchor text and Google picked up on that. Curses! So this post is nothing more than Google spam. I am just spiking this post with my name, Ammon Brown, in order to try to reclaim my rightful place atop the Google results. You can help by linking to me like so: Ammon Brown. I guess I did too good a job optimizing my dot net site for search engines. Perhaps I should try to get this one out of my blogger template and tweak it even better!

OK, I tried. I tried not listening to the hype over the next presidential election. But you just can’t help it, and it is only going to get worse. The election is a long ways off and things are already going like it is next week. In fact, I think the campaigning for 2012 kicks off next month. Might as well get started.

So with that said, I guess I do already have a preliminary favorite. Barack Obama. I know, you say that is a fashionable choice. It is just that the more I read about him the more I think he is a breath of fresh air, even though he is a smoker. The guy just seems like a reasonable person. He still has the idealism of a young politician but has the wisdom of a true leader. I caught bits of the Democratic debate last night and he was the only person who answered the “How to respond to an attack” question well. He said first, make sure that the people affected are taken care of, that we respond quickly to victims. Then we gather as much intelligence as possible to levy an appropriate response. His opponents basically said, “Bomb the shit out of them!”

Another article I saw mentioned how he actually wants to understand issues. In an interview with farmers in Illinois he actually knew all the things they were talking about in terms of regulations, pesticides, etc. Of course he cares about polls, but he also seems to care about issues and solutions. Yes, it is early, but I like this guy. Beats all the other smarmy dunderheads in the field so far.

It has been nearly a year since my last post. A few times over the past year I meant to make a post but I felt it would be disrespectful to bump my brother off of the top spot. However, if there is one thing I have learned in the past year it is that life does indeed go on. Let me catch you up as best I can…

On the family front: This past year we had two weddings, one birth, and a funeral, a net gain of two new family members. You gotta take the good with the bad, I guess. My youngest sister is off to Cameroon with the Peace Corps in a few months. Makes you wonder just what you are doing with your life that is so worthwhile.

On the work front: After doing my own thing for a while, I have gotten hooked up with a startup that handles search engine marketing for small businesses. It is an interesting opportunity and I had to take it.

On the poker front: I have played almost zero poker in the past year. Immediately after my last post I made a few grand online but was not into it so I devoted myself to other pursuits. A few weeks ago I played a tournament in Atlantic City, my first tournament in about 8 months. I won the thing for $3K, so I guess I still have some mojo.

On the personal front: I have emerged from a bit of a fog over the past few months and feel good about life. My parents are coming to visit and we are off to my sister’s graduation from college. Should be a great week!

On the canine front: New Doggy! Bogey is the joy of our lives. We got him in December, he is a mutt mix of golden lab and who knows what else. We were going to name him Golden but I did not really want to immediately think of Kelsey every time I saw my dog. So we named him Bogey after Bogus Basin, a ski area where Kelsey skiied a lot. Not a direct, in-your-face reminder, but a nice tribute, I think. Bogey is a tennis ball obsessed playful one year old now, and I miss him now that I am doing the 9 to 5 thing.

I love this picture of my brother. He would not shave throughout the ski season for warmth, and the end of the ski season was always a big day as he shaved the huge beard in stages. This picture was taken about a month before he landed hard on the snow on May 10th, 2006. He died of his injuries two days later in Reno, Nevada.

My brother was one of the funniest, most honest, blunt, and life loving people I have ever known. He was two years younger than me and the brother who I was closest to growing up (no offense, Dan). Kelsey loved to ski and although I am angry that he is no longer with us, I am happy that he was doing what he loved when he died. The doctors assured me that the last thing he remembers was flying through the air with the wind rushing through his hair. I have no doubt that he would not want to go any other way.

Regardless, I feel angry, frustrated, and incredibly sad that he is gone. For those of you who knew my brother, please take a moment to think of the last time he made you laugh so hard your kidney nearly burst. Smile, because he would have wanted you to.

We got back from Ireland a few days early. The trip was great but was cut short when I called home in response to an email to learn that my brother had been in a bad skiing accident. It looks unlikely that he will pull through. We are flying to Reno in the early morning to see the family.

I am annoyed. Yes, I know… anyone who has ever been a passenger in my car as I navigate the streets of Brooklyn knows that it is not difficult to get me annoyed. But I am annoyed nonetheless. All you non-geeks can tune out now.

I downloaded a handy little program to help me identify huge files on my hard drive (I once found a 4 gig log file). What I disocvered is that of all the folders on my hard drive, the HP drivers for my printer compose the the fourth largest. Why in the hell does HP think they need to have a 166 MB driver download to run a friggin printer? They bundle in a ton of crappy imaging software and trashy spoolers, readers, and massive help files that are just not helpful because they are just not needed. I have a 500 MB folder on my hard drive because HP thinks they can be a software company. They can just stuff it. I will never buy another HP.

But HP is not the only offender (just the worst). Adobe are a bunch of chumps as well. For some reason they feel that a program to open and read a PDF file needs to be a good 90 MB to work properly. Huh? The disk space required for Acrobat reader 5.0 is up to 24 MB. 7.0 requires up to 90 MB. And the only real difference I see is prettier buttons in 7.0 and about 10 times as long to load. No thank you, Adobe. Go find a bigger throat to cram your massive wares down. I found a handy tiny little PDF reader called Foxit that is 1 MB, does not require 20 minutes to download and 15 to install, and runs blazingly fast. Cheers to the little guy! Now I need someone to make smaller drivers for my printer.

What is with these companies? Do they think bigger software will translate to bigger market share? Is it directly proportional to stock price? I hope both companies tank. It is a sick form of arragance that they think they know what users need better than the users do. Make your crap optional! Don’t get me started on Windows, that bundling argument is so old.

I blew milkshake out of my nose when reading this spot-on guide to Red Hook, the neighborhood in which I now dwell. Disregard the poor spelling of the author and you shall feel the funny.

New Site Design
OK, so it is not really a new design. I grabbed a new template for my blog to fiddle with. I was looking at it and decided that I was getting a tad ill looking at my circa 1999 website. I have had it as the ugly red color for a few years, it was time for a change. One rather sad thing about the change, and a reason I kept putting it off, was because the comments have been hosted by an external company rather than by blogger. Even though they were javascript (which I am not keen on using), they are part of the history of my blog. I might put all of the old comments back in and lock them, hoping people will use the new comments. We shall see, there are a number of things I want to do with the site. Eventually I think I will create my own blogging system when I get bored. I just feel that blogger is geared toward beginners. It creates static files for each post, and that can become a lot of disk space. Perhaps I will make it a project to play with mod_rewrite to duplicate the URL structure but move all of the posts and comments to a mysql database. It would probably take me a week to do it all, but I am not motivated to do so at the moment.

Also, stay tuned. I am talking to a very interesting company about doing some work for them. I will update both of my loyal readers when I know more.

Afterthought: Am I a dork for trying to find a good image to post with this entry? I feel like the blog looks a bit empty without a nice image to lead in to the blog entry. But what image works with this entry? I am open to suggestions.