HBO THE SOPRANOS COMMERCIALS HAVE STARTED 10/26/06

http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/downloads/ is where you can go to download some Bada Bing wallpaper for your computer and other stuff.

I watched The Sopranos faithfully all the way through the last season [even though they made us wait sooooo long for it]. I will be watching the show regularly again once it [supposedly] re-starts in January. I made some hot Incredimail e-stationary with Tony Soprano on it.

My excuse for writing about The Sopranos is that some of my good friends watch the show too. Hi Ei and Nancy. Strangely enough, my family does not watch the show. They all snort and go, "Ewww, we don't watch that!" Absolutely amazing since a fourth of the family tree hail from Calabria. I tell some folks that I watch the series because I am studying my Italian heritage. It's true that in the series there is quite a bit of killing, blood, guts, violence, robbery, and flunking out of school. I don't care. I like the show and that is that.

Besides which, there is also Italian meals and Italian music, hot cars, loose women and horny men, a strong message about women being able to determine their own future instead of getting trapped into the same ol', a priest with a major hang-up about home-cooked meals, comraderie, and the beach. Once again, there is something to be said for, "If you don't like it, you can change the channel." [Or block it from your kids' young and innocent brains].

I change the channel when I hear preachers and nuns telling me how to live and think. I guess that makes me like Frank Zappa. He let his kids watch a lot of stuff on teevee but he would not allow them to watch the ministericals asking for money less they get smitted and killed. And I don't run around screaming in public that the preachers are polluting the thoughts of my precious doggie. So save it and go rant about The Sopranos to someone else. Don't make me come over there and show you how to change the channel on your teevee sets.

Anyways, sorry for that bit of a digression which some of the audience will be mildly amused by and the rest will be apathetic to or left mildly simmering. Back to the original purpose of this post, which was to announce that I saw a commercial [or rather heard it, since I was surfing with StumbleUpon in order to build up my bookmarks on del.icio.us on the laptop at the time]. Carmella's voice came on and she said three things. I missed the first thing. Then she said, "The family is a sacred institution," [or something like that] and then something about there must be consequences. After which the announcement was that the Sopranos are re-starting in January of 2007. Hopefully it will actually start then instead of delaying one more time.

Speaking of delays, in news for the geeks among my friends-- Windows is delaying ServicePack3 for XP until 2008. I've already decided we are not giving M$ any money to install the bloated Vista. So when "support" [read 'downloads of security patches'] for XP expires, we will be redoing all the computers in strictly Linux or possibly BSD.

For those friends who are computer security hobbyists, I ran across a site today which offers real tunneling and for free-- no traces, unlike Anonymizer which purports to provide an anonymous proxy but in fact it is only partially invisible and not free. If one uses the Google translation web page service plus the Anonymizer proxy, I suppose that might be better than either alone. Though the whole purpose of it all is to be invisible, thus one might be better off with the real tunneling exe. At least it appears that way to me. Privacy is becoming an increasingly difficult commodity these days.

That is not entirely a bad thing considering the terrorists and bombings and wars and stuff. Though not an entirely good thing either. When I downloaded the Google updates this evening, I was offered a choice of having "safer surfing" and the showing of page rankings in return for sending on my web searches to the big G or not. In order to get the little bar and the numbers that show the rankings of each return on my search, I would have to give up a bit of my reasonable expectation of privacy. Some of that is because Google creates search results "on the fly" though I think there would be a way to program in the little rank bar without having to show where I'm going. Regardless, I said no. I've got lots of ways to keep my web surfing reasonably safe. And I don't much care about knowing the ranking of a search result. Especially since I use other criteria for evaluating accuracy of things I find out there in cyberspace.

I found also today an interesting article about MySpace. Some folks believe that somehow MySpace should do "something" about the nasty sexual predators who sign up for accounts and go trolling for little boys [and probably girls too]. MySpace claimed that their staff are concerned about that thus the age and picture rules. Folks don't always think that is enough. So some techie wrote a script and bingo-- he found bunches of sexual predators on the government registration rolls who were stupid enough to sign up for MySpace with their own legal names. Even after eliminating the false positives, there was still a bunch. One dude got arrested for sending lewd pictures to a boy. Since he didn't meet the boy, the authorities were unable to nail him for anything else.

I won't be much good for anything during the daytime on Friday if I don't get to sleep soon. With that, I will say all of today's e-mail will have to wait til then. Take care of you, and I'll catch ya later.

~sapphoq n friends