From BBC News:

It was found that habitual cannabis users were 9.5 times more likely to be involved in crashes, with 5.6% of people who crashed having taken the drug compared to 0.5% of the control group.

Their risk of an accident was increased whether or not they had used cannabis immediately before the accident.

In other news, the oceans were found to be full of water.

I took a few dusk photos the other day.  I don’t know if my camera’s lens/CCD is really dirty or if I’m just less tolerant than I used to be but lately I’ve been really disappointed with all my sky photos, because of how grainy they are.  I see an amazing sky and jump in the car to go to my low horizon spot and take a bunch of photos and think "these are gonna be beautiful" and then I come home and hate them all.

Anyway... this set contains 11 of the 81 shots I took, and even these I don’t really like.  If only my camera would go down to ISO 50... or have noise-reduction circuitry...

Apparently I’m currently #2 on google for the query quotes against wack people.  The fact that someone actually searched for that is hilarious.  If I had a motto or a middle name, that would be it.  Anthony "quotes against wack people" DiSante.

Have you seen this billboard yet?  It has everyone in California outraged!  We had Gov. Schwarzenegger on our most popular radio talk show insisting that it be taken down.

For the past 4 or 5 years, every time I’ve bought a CD, the first thing I’ve done is put it in my computer and make MP3s from it.

At first it was just for convenience -- double-clicking on a folder to play an album is much easier than going through a few hundred CD cases, finding the one you want, taking it out, putting it in a CD player, etc.  Not to mention that you can tell a computer to do cool things like "play a random album" that you can’t really tell a stack of physical CDs to do.

Once I created my musicbox to play MP3s in my car, that was another reason to have all my music in MP3 format.  No more fumbling with CD wallets looking for something to listen to while driving, and no more only having 40 or 80 albums with you at any given time, never having the one you want to listen to.

For about 2 years now, I’ve also been keeping the WAV files (uncompressed CD tracks) on my computer, instead of deleting them after creating the MP3s from them.  Since WAV is uncompressed, each song is about 40MB compared to about 4MB per MP3, so it takes up tons of space on my hard drive.  But I realized that my huge CD collection would be lost forever in the event of a fire or theft, so I wanted to have them backed up this way.

Now I have about 200 albums (about half my collection) taking up about 71GB on my hard drive.  And my hard drive is filling up.  Last night, Andy pointed out that tools like Flac, which do lossless compression of WAV files, can compress the files to about 70% of their original size.  I had heard of such lossless WAV compressors in the past, but never considered 30% to be impressive enough savings to make it worthwhile.  But now, with my hard drive filling up, and the realization that I have 71GB of WAV files, having 30%*71GB=21GB of free space sounds amazing.

So I’m happily flac-ing all my WAVs as we speak.  And thankfully on Linux this is accomplished with just one simple command:

find /music/cds/ -type f -iname ’*.wav’ -exec flac --best --replay-gain --delete-input-file "{}" \;

When you consider that a nice 250GB hard drive can be had for only $136 nowadays, and that 1GB holds 3 albums in flac format, and that most computer audio players can play flac files directly... having your entire CD collection on the computer is more economical and sensible than ever.

Kim and I got engaged this weekend  ( :

Check out Kim’s post, my photos, and Kim’s photos (some photos overlap, but not all).

No, really.

Applications
-> Utilities
-> Disk Utility
-> Images Menu
-> Open...

I want to open the file /tmp/FC3-i386-disc2.iso.  But the dialog provides no way to view the /tmp/ directory.  It appears that’s impossible.  If it IS possible, a half-hour of searching has yet to lead me to the solution.  Anyone?  Please??