Fight for Blog Rights

I was messing around with Technorati yesterday and came upon this very interesting post. Apparantly some woman who worked for Delta Airlines got fired for posting these "inappropriate" pictures to her blog. That's ridiculous though! I think that's a freedom of speech violation because she didn't violate any part of her contract, and she found male pilots posting pictures of themselves in uniform online as well. She's become quite the martyr now, and she has an interesting blog. You can read an article with more information about her incident here. A group of bloggers have set up an informal bill of blogging rights here and have blacklisted companies that are "blogophobic" (id est, they fired or disciplined blogging employees). I think it's an interesting idea and I wholeheartedly support it. It's not fair to fire people without warning like that, and I think anything you put online that doesn't actually harm the company should be allowed. Apparantly this has become a hot topic in recent months, but I didn't catch wind of it until yesterday.

In other news, some really cool people put up Batman Begins pictures like this one:



There's one batch of cool photos here and another over here. Those are all from Batman News so just ignore the Dutch text. You can also see a picture of Christian Bale carrying the gorgeous Katie Holmes here. I'm still very excited about this movie and still counting the days until June 17.

Now for a couple of random tidbits. Gracenote, who took over a big lyrics search engine a while back, is working on voice recognition integration for mp3 players. Can you imagine just saying the name of a song or an album while driving and then hearing it play?! The future has arrived! And you World of Warcraft players may be happy to know that Blizzard is hindering the sales of the game to prevent further server issues such as the auction house raid that took place Tuesday night and caused massive lag.

A few days ago I believe I spoke about the debate with the new DVD format. I found an even better article covering the issue here, but it includes DivX in the war. My room mate informed me that current DVDs actually won't last as long as a CD because they're so cheaply made. Blu-ray discs, however, are encased by a second layer to prevent scratches from ever affecting the movie. Hopefully I'll have a cushy job before I have to worry about changing video standards!

I forgot to mention it yesterday, but I beat Prince of Persia Tuesday and it was a great story. More importantly, it's just fun to watch what you can do in the game. I highly reccomend it. I tried boiling some eggs last night and I wanted to share a bit of knowledge I learned from it. If you want hard-boiled eggs, slowly boil it in water for six minutes, hold them under cold running water for a couple of minutes, and then soak them in cold water for a few more minutes. I didn't do the cold water thing my first time and I got a semi-liquid mess! And one last note before the meme, if anyone has any idea what the hell I'm doing wrong on the puzzler, please assist!

And now for the Thursday Bookworm:

1. How many books do you own (and if you're not a nerd like me and don't know the exact number, guess-timate)?
Probably somewhere around 40 that I personally own. My mom discouraged me from purchasing books when I was younger because she thought it was a waste of money since I could go to the library, but I snuck them in anyway and still buy today of course.

2. Do you keep books to add to your personal library, or do you trade them/give them away?
I only give away books I've outgrown (kid's books) or school books that I don't feel I need anymore.

3. If you keep books, what makes you keep them? What kind of books do you keep?
I usually keep the ones that I really enjoyed. Especially books that I feel I can read over and over again. I also keep books that I feel I'll be able to refer to in my future programming career. Some books I keep just so I can pass them along to other people.

4. Do you have a guilty pleasure book- something you would never want to admit to reading?
Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul =P I don't read them much anymore, but I have the first three and I loved them. I'll probably pass them down to someone and get other Chicken Soup books.

5. Have you ever gone without something you needed to buy a book instead?
Not that I can think of. You'd have to be really obsessed to do that!