…LOST will finally be over. I’m sad about it ending, but on the other hand, we’ll finally know what happens. And what a relief that’ll be.

(By the way, I’ve been super busy and haven’t really had time to post. But I promise I’ll get my act together and get back to it.)

This post is going to be a random collection of things I saw today on the Internet.

First, a quote from Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul and GOP Senate candidate from Kentucky:

I like the Civil Rights Act in the sense that it ended discrimination in all public domains, and I’m all in favor of that. … [but] I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners—I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I absolutely think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that’s most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind. (#)

So basically he thinks that private business should have the right to segregate? Classy. Oh, good job to Kentucky for making him their candidate for Senate. And to top it all off, apparently the scumbags at Stormfront support this guy. (Did I really just link to LGF? Again?)

In slightly less absurd news, apparently Jemaine Clement is going to be the enemy in Men in Black 3. Really? Him? That will be.. a thing.

And lastly, a roundup of Awfulvision: this guy‘s song about hating Jesus is pretty funny. But this video made me throw up in my mouth a bit.

I walked into a meeting today while holding my Droid, and one of my coworkers said something remarkably poignant: “You have a Zune and a Droid? You really don’t like Apple, do you?” It caught me off guard a bit, but I said, “Well yeah, that’s part of it.”

And it is just part of it. (As a sidenote, I’ve been meaning to write a post like this.) I’ve thought a lot about it, and my view on technology can be summed up thusly:

When making decisions on technology, I generally prefer to go with either the underdog or the less cool option.

I’ve never owned an iPod; I had a Creative Zen before my Zune, and my next player will be a Zune HD. Admittedly I owned an iBook, but I’ve since had two Lenovo laptops. And like I said before, my phone is a Droid. Yes, the Android operating system was built by one of the largest companies out there, but they’re still pretty far behind in the smartphone world (though they’re on the way up in a big way). And maybe Lenovo and Microsoft aren’t the underdogs exactly, but it’s more of just a general distaste for Apple. All the cool kids are using Macs these days, but I’m over the hype. I prefer to have options with hardware, and I don’t need one company controlling their whole product from the top down.

But every single computer I’ve ever built for me has had an AMD processor, and as most people know, AMD is perpetually second to Intel. My new camera is a Panasonic Lumix GF1, which is built on the Micro Four Thirds standard. M4/3 is a relative newcomer to the field and it’s had some good reviews, but it’s not widely supported and it’s in big competition with other systems like it, so I consider it to be somewhat lesser right now.

In some places, though, I can’t go with the underdog. For example, I used to use Scriptaculous for all the Javascript I wrote, but recently I’ve shifted to jQuery – and I can’t go back. It’s so elegant and beautiful to write, its userbase is really active in writing plugins for it, and more companies are using it for their websites. In that case, though, I made the switch because it interferes with my career.

Oh, I actually just thought of another place: I use and actively support Firefox. A fair amount of people have jumped ship and use Chrome now, but I’m going to stick with Firefox because they’re the underdog. IE technically has a majority share, but Google’s browser is moving up, and Firefox is getting hurt by its relatively slow speed (though personally I’ve never had an issue with it.) There’s actually another component to that: I don’t like to give any one company a near-monopoly on my life. My phone, email, search engine, RSS reader, company email and phone browser are all Google, so I don’t need them having a hand on my browser. And yes, for the record, when Firefox Mobile is ready, I will use that as well.

Hi Dan. I was wondering if I could take you away for a few minutes from your searching through the back alleys of Wikipedia for ideas for your next book, in the hopes that we could discuss your recent one.

Yes, I read The Lost Symbol. I’m not really sure why I read it, to be honest; I think I have a penchant for reading schlocky books. Anyway, it was more or less the same book as your previous one, save for some rearranging of characters and locations. You basically wrote an alternate novelization of National Treasure – which is okay, because those movies are awesome. And I can deal with the way you draw really tenuous lines between everything; the front of the book says “a novel”, and anyone who takes any of it at face value is gullible. I’ll even give you credit for pointing out Christianity’s links to pagan rituals, since most of your readers probably either have no idea about most of that, or choose to ignore it.

The main reason I’m writing to you is to ask you this: why did you choose to put in a Twitter joke at the end of the book?

Seriously. What function does it serve at all to have your main character say that he doesn’t know how to make a “twitter”, only to then have the female lead tell him that it’s called a “tweet”? Were you trying to be clever? Show that you have a finger on the pulse of Internet trends? I can’t figure it out at all, and I actually rolled my eyes after I finished the paragraph.

Anyway, it’s late, and I should probably get some sleep. You probably need to get back to playing six degrees of separation on Wikipedia, so… go do that. For added fun, try the Random article link on the left side of the page – it’ll be so interesting!!!!!

After a week-long hiatus, I started playing Final Fantasy 13 again. I had basically burned myself out, getting stuck in battles for which I was underequipped or clearly had no chance of winning. I’m going to try to avoid spoilers, but it basically started when the game became nonlinear. It went from this “walk down the corridor” sort of game, to “here’s a big area, go wander around, and maybe if you get bored, go find the exit.” Fairly abrupt shift, I think, and that’s when the frustration started.

You know, I really wanted to like FF13. It’s been eight years since I played a Final Fantasy game, and I had really been looking forward to it. There’s just something holding me back. Maybe it’s their use of apostrophes.