Just got back from NAMM, and I’m so exhausted. I put up some photos online here, if you want to check them out:

http://picasaweb.google.com/iransofaraway/20070120NAMM

Hah. Apparently I’m 59% like Marky Mark? Rock on!

Click them to make them bigger..

So much to go over… hrm. Let’s see.

Well, I bought a new car, a 2007 Nissan Altima 3.5SL, fully loaded. It’s dark blue. Yep yep yep.

I love it so far, no complaints. And it gets great gas mileage.

Life is busy, but good. My review is any day now, so cross your fingers, pray, or do whatever it is you do to impart good wishes upon someone else, please!

I returned my Zune, but not for the reason(s) you think. I did so in order to help pay my down payment on my car. I’m also selling some other things.. debated selling my XBox360, but decided to keep it for now. I plan on buying the HD-DVD drive later on to enjoy movies on… and I’m sure by the time I get around to it, it will be cheaper than the current $200 price tag.

And now, for some completely random stuff that I think is way cool.

• Chris Pirillo’s wedding reception music. I like the list, and it’s sometimes hard to find a well-thought out selection. I’m keeping it for ideas on my own wedding..
• Vanishing Point, an online challenge/game by Microsoft, for a buttload of prizes. Microsoft started it off in Las Vegas, taking over the Bellagio’s fountains to give away clues to solving the first “box” of puzzles. Check out the video from that event! Crazy. I love how they synchronized everything.. the lights, the water, the projections.. heh.
• BauerCount.com, a website that aims to list every person that Jack Bauer kills while saving our country’s butt. The details are amazing, listing the weapon and method used, as well as including video and pictures. Almost a bit too fanatic, hrm? But awesome.
• Disneyland now has a special “night-time” mode for the Space Mountain and California Screamin’ coasters. Who doesn’t want to rock out to the Red Hot Chili Peppers while riding a coaster? “Higher Ground” is supposedly on Space Mountain, and California Screamin’ plays “Around The World”, kind of like the Disneyland commercials are now…
• Speaking of Disneyland, I found a site detailing Club 33 in its entirety. It’s that door next to the Blue Bayou, with the “33” plaque next to it. Maybe you never noticed it?
• Bruce Campbell smells good, thanks to Old Spice. If you have it, you don’t need it. If you need it, you don’t have it. If you have it, you need more of it. If you have more of it, you don’t need less of it. You need it, to get it. And you certaintly need it to get more of it. Just watch. Bruce is awesome.
• Season 3 Battlestar Galactica bloopers! (PG-13 rated) I don’t get the random Bush stuff thrown in there, but whatever. Pretty funny if you’re a fan of the show.
• If you’re making minimum payments on your loans/credit cards, you’re dumb. Use this online calculator to see just how much money you’re throwing away. Really opened my eyes a bit. Even paying just $10 more a month will help lots in the long run.
• JkDefrag — one of the best freeware defragmentation programs for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista that I’ve ever come across. It’s now replaced Microsoft’s defragmenter on all of my machines. Why buy a product like Diskeeper (which helps fund Scientology, by the way) when you can get something better for free?

My 4Runner just got back from the shop, and I’ve been informed that my engine is… not so well. It looks like the previous owner didn’t really take care of it, and an oil change is showing just how “dirty” the inside is. Bummer. So I’m looking for a new (yes, brand new) car.

I’m crazy, I know. My mission is to find something I like, but don’t end up paying more than $600/month for. And I’m $5000 upside-down on my current loan…

So yeah, fun times! Hopefully Jeff can help me out, since he works for Nissan, and maybe get me a deal on one of those new Altimas. They are looking pretty spiffy right now. My boss just got an Infiniti G35S (Infiniti = Nissan’s luxury line) and it is the cat’s meow of features. The new Altimas have most of them, and cost $20k less. Sign me up for some of that!

I just quickly priced out two Altimas… one for $28,965 and another for $32,175. The more expensive one has bluetooth phone capability as well as MP3 playback, etc. which would be nice, but is it worth $4k?

Does anyone have any advice for car shopping? What not to fall for, etc.? I’ve learned a little bit, having bought two cars in my lifetime from dealerships, but I still end up walking away feeling like a sucker.

I’m having a dispute right now with someone on eBay about a knock-off Zune cable I bought. When I had my iPod, I had bought similiar “third-party” connectors for it and had no problems. This particular cable though is not wide enough on the connector end. The pins are correct, so if you line it up centered exactly and force it in, it will connect. But then of course it’s not locked in, because the side locks don’t reach where they’re supposed to. Anyway, I e-mailed the seller, and he got pretty defensive, saying that the supplier tested it with a Zune and assured him it worked, and that he’s had many others buy this cable without complaints. I don’t see how that’s even remotely possible. I’ve sent him the pic to the right (which I snapped this morning and colored in to show the differences) and we’ll see what he comes back with next.

Just, ugh. Next time I’ll spring the $20 or whatever and get an official cable instead.

http://inquisitivesensitive.blogspot.com/

Be sure to send her some love. She’s just starting out in the blogging world.

Otherwise, she’ll give you the evil eye. See evidence to the right.

The special effects in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 really blew me away in theatres. When I looked into how the Davy Jones effects were pulled off, I was amazed to find that Davy Jones is actually a fully digital actor. We’ve come a long way from the day of Jar Jar Binks, eh? ILM used Bill Nighy’s performance, dressed up in a silly suit made up of dots, to do a sort of “realtime” motion capture on the set, without needing a crazy set up of multiple cameras. Pretty cool stuff. They put together a web-site to show off the things they did for the movie. To the right is a thumbnail of their “experience” section, which allows you to roll-over the film footage to show the raw footage. Pretty nifty.

Okay, so I’ve had the Zune for a while now. Here’s some more thoughts:

• The official 1.2 version is out, supporting Vista fully. I probably shouldn’t have hacked together an installation earlier, because installing the official 1.2 version just forced me to re-do my library. Oh well, my dumb fault. Other than that, smooth sailing on the upgrade.
• There’s no way to easily define what “type” of video you’re putting on the Zune. For example, in iTunes, you could right click on a video and specify that it’s a  TV show, or a music video, or movie, etc… but not so in the Zune software, at least not yet. Microsoft has an overly-technical writeup on the Zune site on how to provide content for the Zune with the proper metadata, but this won’t be helpful to consumers at all; just those mass-producing content for the Zune. Here’s hoping a newer version fixes this problem. Also, please, let us mass-set this categorization across numerous files! In iTunes, you couldn’t just select a bunch of videos and set them all as music videos.. you had to go through them one-by-one. Ugh.
• Microsoft is fully onboard with the Zune, it seems. This is good news, and hopefully they stick to it, to keep a strong competition going with Apple.
• The software reminds me too much of Windows Media Player. It obviously was based on the WMP codebase, but there’s just some design decisions I really disagree with, such as the sidebar to the right that tries to contain a playlist editor, sync list, burn list, and “what’s playing” functionality, swapable by clicking icons above the sidebar. I just hate that sidebar, and almost always want it closed.
• Playlists do not remember what order you sort them in! This was a feature in iTunes that I used all the time, and really miss it on my Zune. In iTunes, it would remember specific sorting rules for each playlist, even smart playlists. It would also transfer this sorting to your iPod. I found a way to sort of hack-it in the Zune interface, by using the sidebar’s playlist editor, and forcing it to sort by album, etc. — but that has problems of it’s own, leading me to my next point:
• When you choose to order by “album” in the interface, you get a smart sort based on album, then track number. Good. But if you do this while making an auto playlist, like so:
  
  You do not get this smart sorting method. You instead get an album title sort, with no secondary sorts thrown in. Your tracknumbers are random, but your albums are clumped together. Huh?
• The Zune marketplace has about the same timeout problems as the iTunes store. You may double click a song to preview it, and a few seconds later get a time out message. Really annoying. Also happens if you’re downloading/buying content from the Marketplace.
• The protected Zune marketplace files are sometimes too “picky” about being re-synched to a Zune. The rules may be different for non-ZunePass files, but on mine, after 3 syncs (add it to the Zune, then remove it, etc.) to the Zune, the file will no longer transfer, and you have to re-download it. I ran into this a lot, when I first reset my Zune and re-added all of the songs… most people probably won’t run into this problem, though.
• There’s no way to select files in an auto-playlist and be able to delete them from the hard drive. If you select files when just looking at a normal playlist, or your “library” view, you can select any number of files, right click and select “delete”. You get asked if you just want to remove the files from your library, or if you want them removed from your library and hard drive as well. It would be nice to be able to do this directly from an auto-playlist. I believe I could, in iTunes.

More bulletpoints to follow as I find them. I still stick with my decision to go with the Zune, and haven’t run into any dealbreakers for me yet. Don’t take my criticism as negative press! Just small complaints.

I have to be honest, this post started as a huge rant against Creative and their "boo-hoo" attitude about Vista drivers. But I decided to instead write about the benefits that the audio changes in Vista will bring about. We should be nearing the end of the lifetime of specialized cards with dedicated APU's (audio processing units), such as the Creative X-Fi, thanks to most audio processing being shifted back to CPU's, now that dual-core and quad-core processors are a reality.

And thank goodness. I've owned about 4 Creative soundcards over the years, and they were all considered the best available at the time.. but I always had numerous problems with them, either with hardware compability or drivers. And who really is competing with Creative right now anyhow? I briefly tried a Philips soundcard, only to find that the drivers were complete junk. Should I just use my motherboard's onboard sound? That might work if I just have a stereo speaker system, but myself, and many others have 4.1, 5.1 and sometimes even 7.1 surround sound systems hooked up to our computers. Most on-board audio solutions either don't let you hook up more than 2 speakers, or they severely limit your surround capabilities.

For example, let's say I was listening to something that had a lot of bass in it. You'd expect your subwoofer to be playing back the deeper tones, right? On older multi-speaker systems, there was a crossover built into the amplifier unit that always sent certain frequencies to your subwoofer. With newer and more typical multi-speaker systems (such as those run through receivers), your amplifier is expecting you to just send the raw audio signal to your subwoofer. Creative cards such as the Audigy and X-Fi have a feature that does this for you automatically. That way the "booms" go to your subwoofer instead of wimply trying to be recreated by your tiny cube speakers. Most on-board sound cards do not have this feature! It just isn't in their hardware at all.

But thanks to Vista's new audio stack, you'll be able to get this feature "for free", as well as other enhancements:

Bass Management does what I was just describing, essentially acting as a cross-over for all audio passing through your speakers. It defaults to 80Hz, which may be just coincidence, but it’s what THX recommends if you’re using all-THX approved hardware/speakers. Most people are not. So you may want to up it to 100 or 120, which is what most people are using anyway. Check your actual speaker’s specifications to see what frequencies the speakers and subwoofer can reproduce and go from there. In the “settings” panel for this enhancement, you are able to adjust the crossover, change the room size (unknown what effect this has), and inverse the subwoofer’s polarity.

Speaker Fill allows you to “upmix” a stereo signal into more than 2 speakers. With this option enabled, there are no settings you can change. It just automagically happens. It seems to do a fairly decent job, and is comparable to the “CMSS” feature found on Creative soundcards. Liken it to a version of “Dolby Pro-Logic” for all your audio content.

Room Correction is a pretty exciting feature that is usually only found in high-end receivers. It allows you to use your computer’s microphone, placed at eye/head level, to automatically have Vista calculate what delay and amplification each speaker should have. This is very important in order to ensure that an equal sound level is coming from all speakers based on your regular listening position. My harmon/kardon receiver has this feature built into the remote, and it made a huge difference for me in setting up my speakers initially.

Loudness Equalization is essentially a real-time soft compression on all audio, making all sound stay at a constant level, whether it’s blaring or quiet. This comes in handy for watching videos, etc. where the volume may be different for each one.

I went looking on the web to see if anyone else had done an extensive write-up on Windows Vista’s audio stack, from more of a consumer perspective, but didn’t come up with much. I found some very technical documentation on Microsoft’s site, as well as a write up from Microsoft’s Larry Osterman regarding what’s changed in Vista versus XP. I also found an article on ExtremeTech about gaming audio and Vista, which is a subject I was very interested in, because I play a lot of PC games.

When Microsoft announced the new Vista audio stack, they also dropped a “bombshell” — DirectSound3D could no longer be accelerated by hardware. This meant that those shiny Audigy, X-Fi, etc. cards were now semi-useless. You can read all about it on the OpenAL site. I’ve already run into this problem myself. I installed Dungeon Siege II and fired it up, went into the options and tried to turn EAX on, only to have the game tell me I don’t have EAX hardware. Huh? Well, the lack of hardware acceleration explains it. Creative is suggesting that everyone move to the “OpenAL” model of sound acceleration, which only recently (past 2 years or so?) started to get used by developers. Here’s hoping that the development studios are paying attention to this technical paradigm shift, and are planning accordingly.

According to the ExtremeTech article, Creative is working on a “wrapper” to emulate full DirectSound and pass those calls to the OpenAL driver, in order to fix these older games. Here’s hoping it works. It would be a shame to lose EAX/3D audio on almost 80% of my games…

I remember when Half-Life 2 was about to come out.. I was shocked that Valve wasn’t implementing EAX support into the game. But then I realized that they were actually doing something better for the consumer by allowing any audio chipset to reproduce the game’s sound effects. That’s why right now, in Vista, I can run HL2 on both my X-Fi and on-board audio and get the same great sound quality out of both, with full effects in 5.1. And that’s the way it should be, in my humble opinion.

That’s him on the right, supposedly. Enjoy!

Was digging through my old photos today, and found a long-lost image from the ol’ western days of an ancient relative (on the right) and his gang of troublemakers:

Man, those were the days. Look at all those money bags! And his gal sure is pretty…

For some reason, sometimes older entries (like my Halloween ones) show up on LiveJournal again as if they were brand new posts.

I have no idea why that happens, and it seems like a bug in their code. Just check the date on them.. hopefully LJ is showing that right?

She’s been begging me to put up a more recent/better photo of us, so here goes

After having so much fun with the iTunes software in Windows (especially Vista), I decided a change needed to happen. On Friday on bought a Zune. So far my experience has been most enjoyable, despite the fact that the Zune software isn’t even supported on Vista yet. But there are workarounds.

Here’s some reasons why I’m digging the Zune over the iPod right now:

• On setup, the Zune software found all of my iTunes music and imported it. It even imported my playlists and song ratings, thankfully. I’d hate to have to re-rate all my songs (it took me months!) The import process took a while, but that was to be expected, since I have nearly 20,000 songs.
• The Zune plays all the same formats of the iPod and more (Windows Media Audio.) I was worried that the Zune would have to convert the MPEG4/AAC (.m4a) files that iTunes ripped into a format that it could play… but no, it just works!
• I had to re-create my “smart playlists” (Zune’s software calls them Auto Playlists.) No biggie. The rule engine looks a little different than smart playlists, but it works the same. I was able to set my few smart playlists back up in minutes.
• The sync speed is crazy fast. To sync around 2000 songs, it only took about 10 minutes. If I hook it back up and sync it again (with no changes), it syncs in less than a second. Woot. On my iPod, iTunes would sit there for minutes trying to sync up all the data, even if nothing changed.
• For some reason, the Zune software wants to convert most of my music videos/movies to a Zune-compatable format. I suspect this is because I did not encode the MPEG-4 video in the proper resolution/bitrate that the Zune supports. I’ll have to do more research on this to see exactly what’s up.
• The Zune interface blows the iPod’s away. It’s way more graphical, and the “sideways menus” are much more friendly than having to go “up” a menu on an iPod. For example, when I choose “music” from the main menu, I’m taking to a series of menus at the top (selectable by using the left and right keys), and the list of the currently selected menu item. Hitting left and right, I can switch between artists, albums, playlists, genres and songs. On the iPod, I would have had to go “up” in the menu structure to change what category to search by.
• When music is playing, the album art takes up about 80% of the screen. Hitting the center button “zooms in” on the artwork and overlays a menu allowing you to change the song’s rating, turn shuffle and repeat on/off, send the file to a friend, or flag the song. The “flag” feature lets you set aside some songs for whatever purpose you wish. Maybe you just really dig those tracks, or you want to flag them to be deleted, whatever.
• Photos and video look great. You turn the Zune sideways to watch them. There is a small indentation in the back of the Zune (underneath the controls) so your hand can more comfortably grip the Zune when it’s sideways. Neat.

And to be fair, here are some of my gripes thus far:

• The Zune software “monitors” folders for changes, which I kinda dig, but at the same time, I’m used to how iTunes does it. Maybe I haven’t found out how to do this yet, but I don’t think there’s a way to just import a single song/picture/video into your library. You have to put it into one of your monitored folders. I want to be able to just drag something onto the Zune software, and have it imported/copied to my library.
• Can’t rip directly to AAC/MPEG4 format. You have to choose between WMA, WMA lossless and MP3. The MP3 encoder they use isn’t the best (LAME would be much better.) So I’m stuck using WMA at 192kbps, which sounds great, by the way. Just a different format to get used to, I guess.
• More to come in time…

After going back and forth with MySpace’s lovely tech. support, it seems they have finally cancelled my account. Thank God— good riddance and all that. Let it be known that it’s taken me an entire month to cancel my account, and at least 6 e-mails back and forth. I dread to think what a parent would have to go through to get their child’s account cancelled…

Please, leave the sinking ship that is MySpace. If you have kids, explain to them why it sucks, and why they should ignore the sexually-themed advertisements on the site. If you run a network at a company, why are you wasting the bandwidth?

And this shall probably be the last post on the subject of MySpace.

http://www.digg.com/politics/90_Million_Americans_Believe_Government_Behind_9_11

Ahh, the internet. It makes everyone a certifiable structural engineer, fireman, policeman, etc…

Forget Occam’s Razor. It’s clearly a government conspiracy! OMGZ!!!

Do a little research before using the conspiracy card, eh guys? And no, “Loose Change” doesn’t count. Check out “Screw Loose Change” to counter that. Next, please?

http://www.filmz.ru/pub/8/7626_1.htm has six photos from Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End. They’re pretty much the same outfits and very “teasery”, but cool non-the-less. My favorite shot is the one to the right… click it to make it bigger.

F-Secure writes about a brand new MySpace worm that is making its way like crazy throughout profiles. It spreads by executing a bit of JavaScript embedded in a Quicktime file. And of course, users can embed whatever objects they want on their pages!

Spyware Sucks has a write-up sharing my same thoughts of MySpace: block it from your networks now. If you have kids, educate them about the badness of the site and get them off of it. If you’re in charge of IT at a company, filter it out.

Unless you want to stick with a website that sends password information unencrypted, lets its usernames and passwords get phished, and semi-knowingly exposes (and possibly infects) a million users to an old exploit via a banner ad.

Sheesh.

I’m almost at my wit’s end with iTunes. Syncing my iPod for the first time this week (with just music and pictures) took all day (~8 hours.) Totally unacceptable. I don’t believe this is problem is specific to Vista, because XP was slow as well for me; it just wasn’t this slow.

My installation of Vista has the latest Intel chipset drivers, ensuring my hard drive is reading/writing as fast as possible, so that’s not the problem. Check out my Vista experience rating to confirm this… 5.7 out of 6 for hard disk speed:

Furthermore, none of the other “heavy” applications I run have experienced a slowdown in going from XP to Vista. In fact, Photoshop seems to be running faster, as do my video games (Oblivion’s level transitions are super fast now!)

Looking around the web for iTunes+slow posts, I came up with this forum post from someone experiencing very-slow network share access under iTunes. Funny enough, I had this exact problem a year or so ago, and ended up ditching my network audio drive, instead copying all the files to my local hard drive. When that still wasn’t speedy enough, I reconfigured my hard drives into RAID0, with very little improvement in speed.

Scott Hanselman also recently wrote a post about iTunes 7 and slowness. He comments more on the UI aspect of iTunes sucking more under Windows/Vista, and I have to agree. Re-sizing the iTunes window is terribly slow, as is the “filtering on the fly” of search results, etc. — in general, iTunes’s speed is a joke.

So what can Apple do to speed things up?

• Implement a real database back-end that will keep track of your files, metadata and thumbnails, making searches more “realtime”.
• Utilize the new Windows Presentation Framework (it’s what gives Vista its flashy interfaces) to make the interface. WPF will even work on XP (via .NET 3.0) so I don’t know why Apple is holding out on this one. Resizing delays, window redraws, etc. would become a thing of the past.
• Optimize the code for Windows. I have a hard time believing that Apple is doing all they can to squeeze performance out of Windows. This might be off-topic a bit, but even though my machine exceeds the minimum requirements put forth by Apple, my machine still cannot play 1080p Quicktime7 video without “pausing” every couple of seconds, yet my machine can handle 1080p WMV-HD just fine. Something is wrong with that picture.

So clearly, iTunes is doing something wrong here and Apple needs to address it. Apple has a feedback form for Vista and Quicktime, so if you’re having problems too, you should fill it out, cross your fingers, and hope your e-mail actually goes to someone who gives a darn.

Apparently disabling UAC had a weird side-effect: Onfolio doesn't work anymore! Onfolio is a Windows Live Toolbar add-on that displays RSS feeds in a "newspaper" format inside of Internet Explorer. If you turn off UAC, Onfolio's newspapers no longer work, and show script errors. Arg... why!?

So I guess UAC will have to be on for now, and I'll just deal with the iTunes problems for now, and hope Apple fixes it soon.

Update: Please check out my other entry involving poor speed in general with iTunes 7 and Vista.

Running with the default Vista installation, you get a feature called User Account Control, which basically lets you be an Administrator on the machine (like you were by default in XP), but every program you run will run in the context of a normal user, in order to prevent programs from having too much access to parts of the operating system, say, a virus or spyware.

It seemed to work okay, only running into a problem with a few programs. There's an option for programs that won't behave that can force the program to run as an administrator, and that usually takes care of the problem. iTunes, though, complains that it's in "compatability mode". Also, every now and then inside of iTunes, it will pop up an error saying that it could not write to the iTunes library. This causes you to lose any new files you just added, etc.-- major bummer.

Searching Google for iTunes and Vista doesn't really yield any valuable results, and I have to run iTunes.. just no way around it for my iPod.. so I had to disable UAC. I probably was going to disable it anyway, being a "advanced user", but for typical PC users, I can see UAC being a great tool in preventing bad software from affecting your operating system.

Anyway, hopefully this blog entry is helpful to anyone else who stumbles on this problem, and hopefully Apple's next version of iTunes takes care of the problems..

This past weekend, I wiped my laptop and main machine clean at home and installed the final version of Vista, available from MSDN if you have a subscription.

I'm loving it so far, but I ran into some hard drive problems along the way.. namely one of my hard drives dying in the middle of installing iTunes. Joy! Not Vista's fault, though.

Anyway, Vista's start menu is completely different from XP, and by default always shows the top used applications. You have to click "All Programs" to see your full start menu. And the view then switches to a single scrolling list, with folders that expand inside this list. What's been driving me crazy is that clicking/hovering to open the start menu folders takes seconds. CPU usage goes to 100%, and the start menu becomes sluggish while this happens. Then the folder opens. Unacceptable.

I did a search on Google, and funny enough, people have been having this problem since early betas of Vista. It's crazy that it hasn't been fixed in the final, but here's hoping Microsoft releases some quick fix later on, and preferably before the January public release, hrm?

In the meantime, like that forum post suggests, if you go into your start menu options and turn off the highlighting of new programs, it solves the problem. I'm guessing that Vista is trying to look up the "last modified date" of every start menu item on the fly, and that's causing the delay?

You've probably heard about this video floating around YouTube of UCLA police officers using a taser on a suspect:

Let's just cut right to it. My thoughts:

• Based on this clip, we don't get a full picture of what happened. According to "news sources" the guy was not supposed to be in the CLICC area after 11 without a student ID. He was asked to leave, and did not do so in a timely manner, so UCPD was called in. This video seems to start a little while after the initial confrontation. Who knows how he acted to the cops initially. And as any decent officer will tell you, treat them with respect, and they'll show the same. I'm sure this guy didn't, based off of my next point...
• "DON'T. TOUCH. ME. Don't touch me. Don't touch me." while being escorted out of the building. That's just dumb. If an officer has his hand on you to escort you out, you need to just relax and be escorted out. Don't insult him, or pull away and tell him to not touch you. Put yourself in the mind of the officer, here. This guy is being uncooperative, and keeps trying to pull away from you. He's not in cuffs at this point (as far as I can tell in the video) so who knows if he has any weapons he could reach for, etc.
• The Taser is used, and he screams "I have a medical condition! Here's your patriot act! Here's your fucking abuse of power! I'm not fighting you! I said I would leave! I said... I... WOULD... LEAVE. I got tased for no reason.. I was leaving this god-forsaken place, you stopped me, you're abusing your power. Here's your justice.." Yeah, you were really complying when you were yelling at the officers and pulling away from them, genius. And way to make this a patriot act issue-- that's just odd. Kind of like you wanted to make a scene? Hrm. As for the medical condition comment, what medical condition keeps you from complying with the officers? Is it something breathing-related? Because you seem to be having no problem screaming yourself hoarse.
• And what happens when the officers tell him to stand up? He tells them to fuck off. Wrong move, buddy. That's just disrespectful! And would it have been so hard to get up? I am reading all over the web that people claim that being tased immobilizes you for minutes, and you can't stand up or anything. I happen to know a sheriff deputy who has been tased (and has tased others) and knows this claim is bogus. Most officers go through training and get tased themselves so they know exactly what it does to the body and how it feels. Go ahead and do a search on YouTube for "taser" (and no, a stungun is not a taser.) Watch how quickly people can recover once the juice is done.
• If you're not in the know, a taser fires two "dart" type projectiles with barbs on the end that try and catch the person's clothing or skin. These darts have long wires connected to them (that stay in the ammo pack in the gun) that deliver the actual shock to the person. Once a taser is fired, and the probes are stuck in someone, as long as the trigger is held down, a cycle occurs: the initial shock is sent (several seconds) and then several 1.8 second bursts are sent. The initial shock is going to make your muscles and body involuntarily tense up. The follow up shocks are going to keep you from ripping the probes off your body. Anyhow. Update: There are reports that the taser was used in "drive-stun" mode, which is the secondary-fire essentially of a taser, where the front of the taser is pressed directly against the subject, no probes involved. This causes localized pain in the area being hit, but does not incapacitate like a full taser probe-hit would. This doesn't really change anything in my opinion, and makes an even greater case for him being able to still physically comply with the demands.
• People constantly criticize the police's use of taser weapons. What-- you'd rather they had used lethal force in those cases? I hate to break it to you, but your odds of taking a taser hit and surviving 100% undamaged are waaaay better than having a police officer shoot you. As most police forces train to shoot-to-kill (and not to "wound"), I find the non-lethal approach a good stopping/compliance method for police to employ.
• The people crowding around didn't help this particular situation, and I'm sure that's why quite a few more police officers showed up to calm the scene. And of course they keep yelling they want badge numbers, etc.-- what would they do with them anyway? They could request a copy of the police report and get them that way, as well. This isn't some undercover operation, or anything. Sheesh. I'm reading on many blogs that the general sentiment is that the crowd should have overpowered the police and protected this suspect. Hah.

In general, I agree with the amount of force deployed/shown in the video. If the suspect had just cooperated from the start, none of that would have happened. And don't try to turn this into a racial/Islam issue, ugh.

Update: Michelle Malkin picked up on the story, and got some feedback from an officer.

Police officers that attempt to match a person’s resistance with the same amount of force all to often end up in litigation or dead.

Wow. I am just speechless right now. I’ll let you read the response that MySpace’s technical support gave me regarding the cancellation of my account:

Hello,

If you wish to terminate your MySpace Account, start by clicking on "Home" in the top navigation menu from any MySpace web page. Once on your personal home page, click on "Account Settings," appearing in the upper left portion of the page, next to your picture. Click on the "Cancel Account" link. You can find it above the "My Account Settings" box. This will link you to the "Cancel My Account" page. There click on the "Cancel My Account" button. Your MySpace Account has now been deleted. Keep in mind, canceling your MySpace account will permanently remove all of your profile information from MySpace, including your photographs, comments, journals, and your personal network of friends. This information cannot be restored. You may re-register your current email address after canceling, but you will need to rebuild your personal network from scratch.

If for some reason you should be unable to delete the account, provide the email plus password for your profile and we will cancel it for you. If you don't remember the password or it has been changed, please send us a salute as verification and we can remove the account.

To send a salute, please do the following:

Create a hand written sign that says MySpace.com and your friend ID. Your friend ID is the number between ID= and &mytoken in your profile's URL.

Get an image, or digital picture of yourself with this hand written sign.

This is image is a salute. Next, reply to this e-mail with the salute as an e-mail attachment, or as an e-mail link to where it is uploaded.

If this does not answer your question, please click:

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.contact

Thank you,
MySpace.com

What the.. so let me get this straight. I can’t use the automatic function to cancel my account, which is what I e-mailed support in the first place with; indicating that this is a standard response letter. Okay, no biggie. They say I need to e-mail them my password and e-mail address, and they’ll delete it. Okay, I already e-mailed you from that specific e-mail address, asking to be deleted. Why do you need my password too? Ugh.

Furthermore, if you forgot your password, you’re supposed to take a picture of yourself, holding up a sign with “MySpace.Com” and your profile ID? Wow. That just blows my mind. I won’t even get into privacy implications.. why they need a picture of yourself.. and who recieves/views/stores these photos.

I’m reminded of Vinny’s fun time at trying to cancel his father’s AOL account. JUST CANCEL MY ACCOUNT.

MySpace is scum. Block it from your computers, especially if you have young children. If you’re running the network at a business and haven’t blocked it yet, shame on you.