I am currently in an accounting class at a local university. I find it to be very interesting. If you look at the history of money in our country, it is interesting to note that we were once on the gold standard, meaning that our money was backed by gold and therefore actually worth something. Eventually we stopped keeping gold to back our currency, and paper money was backed by, don’t laugh, the good credit that the United States has on a world scale (you would think the national debt would ding our credit score, but maybe other countries don’t know about it yet). The recent trend has been to move away from paper money and replace it with virtual money. I’m not talking about people who sell things on secondlife.com, or are forever mining on World of Warcraft and then selling their fake money for real money on ebay. I am talking about the vast number of plastic cards that have replaced the paper dollars and metal coins that everyone used to carry around. The main reason for the change is convenience, and I truly like this more efficient method of spending. Along with the change in currency however, we have replaced our friends as well. While websites like MySpace and Facebook gain in popularity, everyone around me seems to be replacing their old-style friends (a.k.a. people) with virtual friends. These are individual personalities that may or may not be desireable, filtered through cyberspace, who show up as one sentance conversations on a webpage somewhere. Now I like cyberspace as well as the next person, but once I stopped to think that my best “virtual” friend could be a child molester living in a cult compound, I realized MySpace wasn’t for me. So I ask you (and I will try to make the language more understandable to those I am talking to), “Do you have more virtual friends than actual friends?”
IF YES
DELETE “MySpace Account”
SHUTDOWN “Computer”
END IF

Now go out and talk to someone, geek!

I spent part of today at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA talking to some of the folks behind Google Docs & Spreadsheets, part of Google’s Web-based office suite. One of the things I was itching to know about were some of their favorite features that often don’t get the limelight, or that people simply didn’t know about.

read more | digg story

They look really stunning… Must have taken many weeks to complete each of them.

read more | digg story

Mitchell Silverman, an attorney in Florida, noticed in a recent news-story that GW Bush’s twin daughters presented him with a mix CD of exercise music for Father’s Day. Since the record industry maintains that making and distributing mix CDs is a copyright infringement, Silverman sent their legal offices a letter on letterhead asking them to sue.

read more | digg story

My last job was t-shirt production and, as with many production jobs, we would listen to the radio while we worked.  My coworkers liked rock music mostly, so all of our ears were subjected to hour after hour of bands like Royal Bliss, Nickelback, Buck Cherry, etc.  Unsurprisingly, most radio stations feature a handful of bands that they play over and over.  One of the most overplayed is Nickelback.

I must have heard songs like Nickelback’s “Hero” hundreds of times a piece.  These songs were all way overplayed, and I never really listened to the lyrics.  I have been at my new job for a while now and for some reason, maybe because the job I am at now requires me to use my brain, or maybe because I sit alone in a cubicle for several hours a day, I really started to contemplate the words to some of the songs that I heard oh so many times at my last job.

The one offending phrase that I can’t get out of my mind comes from Nickelback

“I hold on to the wings of the eagles, watch as they all fly away”

Did they fly away without their wings?  Are my arms stretching to amazing lengths as they go?  Or perchance, I am still with the eagles but I left my eyes on the ground.  What the devil are they talking about?  Maybe I need to be disillusioned, but I like to think that the majority of the world’s English-speaking population aren’t total idiots.  That’s why I don’t understand how a band like Nickelback can popularize such nonsensical sentiments.

This is my plea to you as a citizen of the world, STOP THE MADNESS.  Demand that bands actually think before they perform.

-Andy Morrise