When I download stuff I figure it’s no one’s business but mine, so I use a neat program called PeerGuardian — it essentially tracks certain organizations that like to spy on you and blocks them from doing so.

Today I peeked at the list of what it had blocked in the past few minutes:

(Click to enlarge.)

Why does the office of the president of Lithuania care what I’m downloading? I’m open to suggestions.

(Moviex, by the way, is a company that tries to prevent people from pirating movies. Evidently it’s also interested in more than just that. I happened to be getting a game demo.)

I have tried a lot of video-editing applications, both consumer and "pro" — Avid, Pinnacle, Premiere (and Premiere Elements), Ulead — and none of them can hold a candle to Sony’s Vegas family, which includes Vegas Pro and Vegas Movie Studio.

It’s a shame that Pinnacle Studio and Adobe Premiere Elements are the two big names that come up when you talk about consumer video editing (aside from iMovie and Window Movie Maker, both of which are free).

Pinnacle is absolute crap. Flotsam. Garbage. It’s not about the dumbed-down interface; the thing just doesn’t work. Read the message boards and you’ll see they’re full of complaints about slow performance and frequent lockups.

Premiere is better, for sure, but compared to Vegas it’s overly complex and certainly unintuitive.

I’m not a video-editing pro by any means, and I don’t intend to be one. But I do like to take my videos and make them a bit better. I add titles and simple transitions (fancy transitions, to me, are a mark of an amateur) and edit hour long videos down to five minutes.

But occasionally I get a bit fancy — I’ll add still photos, or dub in a sound, or do a picture in picture. And I want doing those things to make sense.

With Vegas they do. (Vegas is the pro product; most of you will want Vegas Movie Studio which sells for about $100 — the same as the other consumer editors.)

Most video editors are similar. You have your timeline where you drop and arrange the clips that make up your movie, you have a preview window, you have a list of clips, and so on.

The first nice thing I discovered about Vegas is how it handled transitions. If you have two clips next to each other on the timeline, you simply drag one so it overlaps the other by a few frames (or more). You automatically get a crossover transition — one fades out as the other fades in.

With crossovers and fade-to-black being the most common and useful transition, this makes things really easy. (With Premiere you put the clips next to each other, the make your way through the video transitions lists and sub-lists until you find the crossover, then you drag it between the clips. For a feature you use a lot it’s really annoying.)

All of Vegas is like that: Clean and intuitive. Sure, there’s a learning curve. You’ll have one with any video editor. But so much about Vegas is done right that the curve isn’t that steep. (And unlike Pinnacle or Ulead products, you don’t feel like you’re being treated like an idiot.)

Vegas has a gadzillion features that I won’t bother to list, from HD support to a huge list of output formats, to tons of plugins.

If you want to get into video editing beyond Windows Movie Maker (which isn’t bad, to be honest), Sony Vegas Movie Studio is the way to go. You can even download a 30-day free trial if you don’t believe me.

Sony Vegas Movie Studio: About $70-$129 depending on version

Short white boy.

Really.

Argh! Too many e-mails that need followups! Argh!

All the outlets in our house work fine, save one. With that one, plugging in (and turning on) the vacuum caused the breaker to trip. Most other appliances didn’t, but some did. Clearly there was a problem with the circuit.

It wasn’t overloaded by any stretch, and all the wiring appeared correct according to my plug tester thingy. So maybe it was a bad breaker.

Our landlord is a nice guy, but not always the quickest responder unless it involves imminent danger to the house. I wasn’t going to bug him with a problem I wasn’t even sure of.

I figured to tackle it myself. And thanks to Jeff Sturgeon, I can.

A few months ago, in my old house, Sturgeon showed me how to open the breaker box — something I considered one of the scarier things in my home; there’s a lot of electricity running through there.

Anyway, with Sturgeon’s help we added a circuit to that house, and thus the mystery and fear associated with the breaker box was gone. (In large part because that breaker box was an ugly mess. If I was cool with it, I would be cool with anything.)

I was therefore willing to open the breaker box here. I had identified the questionable breaker, as well as one of the same rating (20A) that wasn’t used at all. (I still don’t know what it controls.)

I opened the box, shut the main breaker, and swapped the questionable one with the unused one. No fear.

And it worked just fine. Now the vacuum doesn’t trip the breaker, and I have Sturgeon to thank for making my life easier.

I was thinking about the way we punish people from crime in this country, and it struck me how poorly considered it is.

I’m not talking about the whole "retribution vs. rehabilitation" issue — at least not directly. I’m talking about the general thought process we use in dealing with criminals.

Except for a few oddball cases, we deal with them in one of three ways: We incarcerate them, we make them pay money, or we execute them. And that’s it. We’re so used to it that we rarely consider how limited those options are.

Steal a car? Go to prison. Try to kill someone? Go to prison. Take a baseball bat to someone’s house? Go to prison. Bilk investors? Go to prison.

Doesn’t it seem that we ought to have more options? No, I’m not advocating cutting off a thief’s hands; we rightly have a knee-jerk reaction that doing so is barbaric. (Killing someone, though, is not, of course.)

But consider the thinking behind that kind of punishment. It deals with a particular crime in a particular and logical way, much like the people who advocate castrating rapists do.

We talk about "let the punishment fit the crime," but all we mean is "longer prison sentences for greater crimes."

Well, not all the time. For example, I see today that

Actress Rebecca Broussard was sentenced to jail time and morgue duty Monday after pleading no contest to a drinking and driving felony charge.

She was sentenced to do highway cleanup and to "participate in a hospital and morgue ‘Scared Straight’ program." I like the morgue duty; forcing a drunk driver to see these bodies makes sense, if that’s what will happen. Or a sentence of "visiting the families of people killed by drunk drivers" would also work.

This isn’t to say I have the answers, but I’m hoping it’ll be one of those cases where now that I’ve pointed it out, you’ll begin to notice it around you.

The good news: BusinessWeek says iTunes is the number-two music retailer in the US behind Wal-Mart. (Neither can hold a candle to pirated music, however; more people get their tunes that way than any other, by a huge margin.)

The bad news: Windows Mobile-based phones are outselling iPhones by a huge margin. Microsoft reports 14.3 million phones using Windows Mobile were sold in the past six months, compared to fewer than 4 million iPhones.

And, Engadget says, "it expects to hit 20m WinMo phones sold by June." That’s compared to the 4.5 million Apple expects to sell.

As usual with Apple, though, comparisons aren’t direct because only Apple sells Apple products, whereas (in this case) Windows Mobile is used in handsets from a whole lot of phone manufacturers.

Well well well. Turns out that L. Ron Hubbard, the failed sci-fi writer who started the Scientology cult actually stole the whole thing, name and all.

Via Boing Boing, we learn that a German book from 1934 called Scientologie was the basis for much of Hubbard’s work.

Boing Boing got it from a post at Enturbulation, and you can read the full details at http://www.scientologie.org/english.htm.

Besides claiming that it’s a religion (and not a wacko cult), Scientology also claims to have copyright on all its ’sacred texts.’ They didn’t want everyone to know that they believe people were brought to Earth by the galactic tyrant Xenu… oh, never mind.

Anyway, the fact that Hubbard plagiarized much of those ’sacred texts’ calls into question the whole copyright issue, doesn’t it? Or maybe that’s just my thetans talking.

Via USA Today:

The Miami Herald says the outages are “cascading” across the region. They’ve been reported in Miami, Doral, Westchester, Pembroke Pines, Miramar and Boca Raton.

WFTV-TV reports that outages are also being reported in the central part of the state, including Brevard, Orange and Osceola counties.

But here’s your money quote: “A spokesman for the power company tells AP that the outages began after they shut down a nuclear reactor for ’safety reasons’.”

I’ve changed the addresses of my RSS feeds to exclude the Twitter-based stuff.

As was pointed out in the comments, having the "microblog" is really annoying for people who use RSS to keep up with the site. So I’ve changed the feed address to exclude those entries and thus only show the main blog.

Here are the the new feed locations (which you can also get by subscribing from the home page).

Atom:
http://www.kantor.com/blog/feed/atom/index.php?feed=rss2&cat=-176

RSS 2.0:
http://www.kantor.com/blog/feed/rss2/index.php?feed=rss2&cat=-176

Speaking of which, how many poor kids could he feed with what he’s gonna spend on a losing campaign?

Nader to Dems: I’m gonna try to screw you again.

Woke up this morning and Twitter is working again. Will miracles never cease?

Yep, Twitter screwed up again. Don’t know why I bother.

Once again, Twitter has failed me. Or so it seems. I’ll check in the morning.

OK, it is working. Isn’t this fun? Can you imagine that people do this all day long?

Well, I thought it was working….

All right, it’s working!

I’m not a fan of Twitter; I think it’s kind of silly to expect people to follow your every move, every minute of every day. Further, it’s yet another site for people to go to check in on their friends.

I have a Twitter feed (and Facebook and MySpace pages, among others), but it’s more because I need to know about this stuff than because I actually use it.

But I found a neat use for Twitter. I had wanted to create a "microblog" — a section on this site for quick hits that didn’t warrant a full blog entry. WordPress lets me do that pretty easily — I can create a category called "microblog" and have posts in that category appear in a separate place.

But that would mean launching my blogging tool (Windows Live Writer) every time I wanted to dash something off. I wanted something quicker.

Twitter to the rescue.

I may not like it, but plenty of others do, and that popularity means there are plenty of Twitter tools, including a Firefox add-in called Twitterbar that lets you type an entry into your browser’s address bar and have it posted to Twitter.

Way cool. Way cool because I also found Alex King’s neat WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools. It takes any Twitter post and makes it a blog entry in a category of your choice.

So I created a "twitter" category, installed these two tools, and whenever I post a twit — er, tweat — it’s automatically pulled into this blog. (See the right side of the home page.)

So now I can post a fast "microblog" entry from Firefox’s address bar by clicking on a little green plus sign. Way cool.

Update: I spoke too soon. It seems Twitter has some problems, so the updates don’t always work. I thought it was a WordPress problem, but I see it’s on Twitter’s end. Oh, well.