The TV news channels are live in the center of Baghdad.  Hundreds of Iraqis are gathered around a giant 3 or 4 story statue of Saddam Hussein.  Apparently no longer afraid of Saddam, they have put a long noose around the neck of the statue, and are pounding away at the base of it with a sledgehammer.  Amazing.  It continues to be absolutely mind-boggling that anyone has ever claimed that the Iraqi people didn’t want this war.  This news, along with so much of the news over the past 3 weeks, shows that the anti-war camp had entirely different, selfish motives for their position.

[Update:] Steve Den Beste says it well:

It’s got to be damned tough right now being a leftist antiwar columnist. Everything went wrong – which is to say, nothing went wrong. There doesn’t seem to have been any mass slaughter of civilians. The Americans stupidly refused to carpet-bomb Baghdad. The war went rapidly, and coalition casualties are extremely light. The bombs which have been dropped have stubbornly insisted on actually hitting what they were aimed at; none of them seems to have gone off course and hit an orphanage or an old people’s home. Some days it just seems as if there’s hardly any point in getting out of bed.

And what is now coming out about life in Iraq, and the way that the Iraqis are beginning to greet the invading army, is beginning to make it look as if they’re actually the good guys; it’s beginning to look a whole lot like liberation rather than brutal conquest. Facing all of that, it’s got to be damned tough trying to find some way of proving that you were right all along and that the war really, truly, was wrong – and still is.

Of course, there’s one easy way to do it: ignore all the evidence. See what you want to see; dismiss all the rest as being propaganda manufactured by the coalition. And, of course, it is a foregone conclusion that there’s no moral equivalence between the two sides. Naturally not! How can there be equivalence when it’s obvious that the Americans and British are much worse than Saddam’s regime?
...
In order to prove your case, all you have to do is to make up coalition atrocities. It’s obvious that using cluster bombs on civilians is a terrible crime. Never mind that the coalition hasn’t actually done such a thing; that doesn’t matter.

You have to love Fox’s Shepard Smith: "Now, here’s Greg Kelly, live from Saddam’s front door."  : )

Rachel has a good one about our troops over there... photos of them "resting."

The musicbox is installed, Golfy is happy, I am happy.  Go see the main page, updates page, and the new photos.

I hooked my musicbox up in my car last night, just temporarily to test it with the el cheapo DC->AC power inverter that I bought... and it runs!!  Even with the car off.  It doesn’t survive ignition, however, but I didn’t expect it to; at ignition, the car’s "12 volt" power line dips to more like 10 or even 9 volts.  So, that resets the unit.  But no big deal, and even the DC->DC power supply that I would have built would suffer from that problem.

So... woohoo!  This guy is ready to rock.  I wrote some code to randomize the music, so now when I press the "\" key, it plays a randomly-chosen album (out of the ~300 on the hard drive).  And when I press the "/" key, it creates a playlist of 100 randomly-chosen songs from all albums.  It’s so sweet.

I found out that I can send the audio signal into my head unit via the CD changer plug [which I’m not using (obviously, now  : )  ], so that makes life easier, because I can use the head unit’s volume control to control the musicbox’s volume.  All I need to do is buy the $18 cable from Kenwood, which just "converts" the 13-pin DIN CD changer plug into 2 RCA plugs.  Which means, of course, that 2 of those 13 pins are the left and right audio channels, one is the audio ground, and 1 or 2 are used to tell the head unit that there’s a CD changer present.  And that means... I don’t need no steekin’ $18 cable, I can hack it myself.  Go engineering!

Looking at the current competition in the car mp3 market, we have:

The Sony MEX-1HD.  10 gigabyte hard drive.  So going with an average of 75 megabytes per album, you can fit 133 albums into this guy.  But you can’t just copy them from your existing mp3 collection.  You have to rip each CD through the head unit onto its internal hard drive.  At 8x speed (= insanely slow).  And the display is tiny and cluttered.  For $1500.  Well, at least it’s cool looking.

Then there’s the Neo Car Jukebox.  This thing is pretty cool.  It has an internal hard drive too, and you can choose the size: 20 gig for $380, 40 for $440, and 80 for $500.  But it doesn’t mount in your dash like a normal stereo; instead it mounts under a seat like an amp, and it has a wired remote display / controller that you stick on the dash somewhere.  So that’s sort of tacky and weird, and it’s a small display too.

For both of those, you have to scroll through your music collection to find the band you want to listen to.  Scrolling on a display with 3 or 4 lines is a painful experience.  I think this is the biggest strength of my design.  Although you can scroll it just like those others, you can also go directly to the band you want just by typing 2 or 3 letters of the band’s name.  Type b e and you’re at Beastie Boys.

Most people’s initial reaction to this is "typing while driving???  that is so dangerous!!"  Well, it’s not typing as in typing your tax return.  It’s hitting 3 keys, for goodness’ sakes.  You need to have your eyes off the road for much longer in order to scroll through 100 or 200 or 300 bands, than to hit 3 keys.

Having a keyboard in your car also seems sorta annoying... I wasn’t sure how to get around this until I happened across this Gyration keyboard one day.  It’s small and thin and light, it’s wireless (radio) so you don’t have to point it or mess with wires, and it’s slick looking because it’s black.

And my display is big -- 4x40 characters -- and it fits right in the dash like a head unit.  So as far as looks, my setup is looking pretty nice.  And it was way cheaper than the Sony unit above, and even a little cheaper than the Neo.  $100 for the keyboard (which came with a mouse that I didn’t want, and a mouse charger, so it should be much cheaper), $120 for a 40 gigabyte hard drive, about $70 for an old computer, $30 for the LCD screen, and $0 for all the free software that I used/wrote for it.  So just over $300, and probably more like $270 once Gyration starts selling the keyboard separately from the mouse and charger.

Oh, one last thing... and this completely blows everything else out of the water... once I manage to set up wireless networking in Linux, my musicbox will have mobile wireless internet access  : )  Now, I won’t be web-browsing too much on a 4x40 screen (although some pages like stock scripts and news tickers... and come to think of it, blogs... would be perfectly do-able) but email and instant messaging will surely be in full effect.

Hey A,

I’m playing around a little with your streamer script, and it only seems to update the first stock on the list, while the others remain unchanged and at the time the script was started.  What’s up with that?

Hi honey,  Grandpop Mack is here and we’re checking out your webpage and discussing your stand in support of our troops.  He wanted me to write to you and tell you how very proud he is that you are so involved in these current affairs and that Fox News Network (the 7:00p.m. to 9:00p.m. shows are his favorites as are yours.  (following p.s.is direct quote from Grandpop Mack):  Saddam is soon going to see what the ’mother of all battles’ REALLY looks like!

I got really into this band called "In Pieces" a few weeks ago, and their album "Learning to Accept Silence" is one of the most exciting albums I’ve heard recently.  It’s just so darn moving, it rocks, hard.  Their song "The Anchor" is my song of the week; go take a listen (also available on my music page).  It starts out all BOM BOM BOM CHA... BOM BOM BOM CHA... and then they switch up the timing halfway through the first verse and it catches you off guard and it sorta swings... then it gets really hard and dangerous, and more rocking... and then halfway into it, it gets nice and slow and quiet and you’re like "Ahhh so peaceful and pretty" but then it’s time for BOM BOM BOM CHAAAAA!! again and and . . .  well just listen to it!

So this music-playing computer that I’m about to put into my car, I mean, it’s awesome, but now that it’s about to be done, the full power of its coolness is just starting to hit me.  I’m going to be driving around with three hundred albums just a button away.  No more messing with CDs in the car.  That will be so nice.  And also, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but I’ll write some code to do random playing... so every song could be random, like the radio except all the music doesn’t stink, or I could have it do whole albums at random... I’m just so excited about this.

Oh, and one last thing, the cheat is not dead.  This is the best one in a long time  : )