i knew it had to come sometime: The Day I Was Too Busy at Work to Blog.

let's pray for a quick end to this reign of terror.

We haven't had any mouth-foamingly rabid political content recently, so I thought I might as well throw out something. A few links to remind us all that if we let them corporations would greedily feast on our eyeballs, then charge us for it.

• Companies are disclaiming liability for accidentally revealing your personal data. These waivers of liability are usually couched in lengthy End User License Agreements. EULA's themselves are evil, since they give companies all kinds of ridiculous rights to collect your personal information, modify your computer, etc. Frequently you submit to the EULA by opening software; in some cases it's not possible to turn on a new computer without consenting to waive some of your legal rights.
  
• NEC has patented carbon nanotubes. Which would be fine, if you couldn't find carbon nanotubes by sticking any given piece of coal under an electron microscope. Chances are we'll need these things if we're ever going to build an elevator to outer space, room-temperature superconductors, or, most importantly, spiderman-style webshooters. This is like patenting diamonds.
  
• There's a bill under review in the House that would allow companies to own databases -- tantamount to owning facts. This isn't good.
  
• And finally, my own personal, trivial pet peeve: when using a checkcard, stores are making it increasingly difficult to navigate through their touchpad menus to find "pay by credit" instead of "pay by debit". If you have to give them a PIN you're paying by debit, even if you specifically told them you wanted credit at the start of the menu process. The difference: you pay the debit transaction fee; the store pays if you're using credit. And you lose all the credit-card transaction-protection benefits (although admittedly most of these are pretty limited for checkcards anyway).
  

Credit where it's due -- most of these stories have been on slashdot.

In celebration of Charles' birthday his folks treated him, Jon and me to tickets to see John Hiatt's last night of four sold-out performances at the Birchmere. I can never tell how many people know who John Hiatt is -- everybody's heard at least a couple of his songs, but he probably wasn't the one singing them. He seems destined to be one of those guys, like Warren Zevon, that will only get the credit he deserves when he's about to kick the bucket. Mark my words, we'll all be listening to a Hiatt medley sometime around the 2020 Grammies (most likely performed by Justin Diaz-Timberlake Jr. and MC ICanPutTheWordFuckInMyNameNow).

The show was great. I'd never seen him in concert before -- it was just him, with only an acoustic guitar and harmonica to defend himself. At least a third of the songs had completely new arrangements, and all of them were treated to some outstanding improvisation during fills and solos. You could practically see the new song ideas falling off the neck of the guitar as he whipped back and forth between jazzy digressions and anchoring, poppy major-chord stuff. Okay, I'll stop pretending like I know anything about music theory and just summarize: it was pretty great.

I'll try to avoid boring everyone with recitations of the stage banter I found so amusing in context. However, he did tell one noteworthy story about his high-school-age daughter hitting him up for tickets to go see Linkin Park. She went with some friends, who met up with a friend of theirs. The secondary friend was dead-drunk and hurt herself somehow; primary friends split to avoid trouble. Daughter goes through much personal anguish dealing with the authorities.

Anyway, I share this because as Hiatt told it, the moral of the story was that only dumb people go to Linkin Park shows. I have a feeling, though, that Jeff will take it more to mean that Linkin Park shows are a good place to meet drunk high school girls.