The Last Candle

The big stir these days surrounding possible Democratic Party nominee John Kerry is the discussion over his medals during a 1971 protest. Most recently and perhaps most terrible for the man, Kerry had an interview on Good Morning America by Charlie Gibson and couldn’t make past and present statements match. Did he throw the medals? Or just the ribbons? Or did he only throw some ribbons? Were all of the medals actually his? <p/> It’s like throwing an axe at a bulls-eye, but aiming for the car behind it instead of the should-be target. He threw the ribbons or medals or someone else’s medals, okay? Maybe the guy next to him threw anti-war muffins baked by a widow. Fine. But the tossing evidently meant something significant to him at the time. People are getting caught up over the medals themselves. Thankfully, someone with insight such as political/war blogger Lt. Smash brought up some questions that are important to his character today that Kerry should address, instead of fighting this business about which part of what made it over the fence. Much more to the point of the campaign than ribbons and metal 30 years ago:

Why did Kerry take part in the symbolic act of �returning� his decorations? Is he ashamed of what he did in Vietnam? If so, why does he repeatedly bring up his service in the context of the political campaign?

Bingo. Three other questions at Lieutenant Smash’s place.

Jocelyn has the pig visiting her while the parents are out on the West Coast visiting Beck, Dan, and little Charlie. She’s set up surveillance so the entire Internet population can keep an eye on the beast to make sure he doesn’t set anything on fire or try to operate heavy machinery. Although, speaking from experience, he himself is quite heavy.

The excellent Ars Technica is featuring a face-off between three third-party AOL Instant Messenger clients:

However, many users would agree that [the official AIM client] is abominable. Confusing buttons, serpentine menus, and awkward dialog boxes dominate this program. Newer features feel cobbled on rather than fully integrated. Any reasonable geek would ask, “couldn’t this be better?” Of course it could.

GAIM, Trillian Pro, and Miranda IM are tested through a fairly simple gauntlet, comparing usability, functionality, and compatibility. <p/> I’ve wanted to do an article comparing AIM clients for some time now, but I’m glad the smart guys at Ars beat me to it. As for my own personal commentary, I used to be a big GAIM fan around version 0.6 (currently 0.76), but around 0.65 the Win32 client would crash on startup every time. (I never had problems using it under FreeBSD. Speaking of which, where’s the love for NAIM?) I never cared for all the extra hoggy features of AOL’s client (AIM phone, ads, voice chat), so I rooted around a bit and gave both Miranda and Trillian a spin. This was at a time where my terms of software use was turning into “good functionality and configurability, with enough visual design to hide a boring interface without obstructing usability.” For example, something like xcalc has perfect usability, but isn’t something you enjoy looking at. A little window decoration is helpful in being comfortable with an application. In this area, Miranda doesn’t have all the features Trillian does (it’s just a framework after all), but it is incredibly expandible and configurable through the plugin and customization database. <p/> Although Miranda does miss out on some nice features as the article explains. I can’t read away messages or transfer files through the AIM plugin, but have to depend on plugins for those functions. (So far, there is no solution to reading other people’s away messages. I got over it.) The AIM plugin uses the older AIM protocol TOC, which doesn’t support those features. The Ars Technica article mentions that Miranda IM version 1.0 will use OSCAR, AOL’s recent full-featured protocol, but Miranda only releases a new 0.0.x version every three months or so. At that rate, we might see an OSCAR-compliant plugin by 2026. <p/> …and I’ve noticed that GAIM doesn’t crash for me anymore. Maybe it’s time to go back and get reacquainted and see how much I really miss away messages.

Damned be Anthony’s coffee. After just one single cup, twitchy confusion and a slight attention deficit sets in. Two cups makes my mind totally incomprehensible and any reading material is about as good if it was written in alternating Greek and Arabic. Few things worse in a schedule than needing the brain to cooperate on a deadline, and all it wants to do is wander and laze about synaptic fields. <p/> A good beer (just one…or so), on the other hand, is grease and polish for rusty gears.

It was just last Saturday that I expressed love for the newest power metal releases and lamented Blind Guardian not having any releases on the schedule. All has been made good and well:

The long awaited Blind Guardian DVD entitled “Imaginations Through The Looking Glass” will be released in Germany on June 14, 2004 (other release dates to follow as they are confirmed).

It also mentions that the disc set will not be region free, with separate NTSC and PAL versions incoming, but since Blind Guardian has a label (Century Media) and solid following in the grand ole’ US, no doubts to this fan that it will be domestic after the Germany release pretty quickly. <p/> A two DVD set, the first disc contains what looks to be the Bards’ entire show at the Blind Guardian Festival from June 2003. They’ve got a great listing from the concert, songs including Nightfall, Mirror Mirror (no surprise there, everyone loves it), The Last Candle (cough), and all songs from my favorite album, Imaginations From The Other Side. (Except Born In a Mourning Hall. Boo.) The second disc has some hopefully awesome “Behind the Scenes” type stuff that I love from power metal bands (especially Nightwish) and a few more videos from different concerts with a couple great tunes: Lost in the Twilight Hall and Into the Storm. Nothing yet on what quality the audio will be mixed, but if it’s 5.1 or some mix higher than 2 point stereo, I might hold a festival of my own. <p/> …Actually, I’m not a huge fan of live productions. Yet. I’ve never seen one in length, so maybe this is my key to getting into it. If anything, the set will be a source of remakes for classic Bard tunes.