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Reading news stories today made me wonder.

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After receiving a cease-and-desist order, then receiving much media publicity, a high school in the bronx is staging a performance of Chicago next week. They of course are doing this in complete violation of copyright law. They’re also violating a non-compete agreement because ‘Chicago’ is currently playing just a few miles away on Broadway.
For those of you who don’t know, you have to have permission, and usually pay royalties to perform a published play. Granted, not everybody knows this, but a high school drama teacher should. Doesn’t it sound at least a little fishy that Anthony Cerini, the drama teacher, “transcribed the ‘Chicago’ script while watching the movie version.”

No one at Lehman High School made the application and the principal, Robert Leder, said he had not recalled having to apply for anything in 27 years of putting on high school musical events. -NY Times

27 years and never payed royalties or received permission to perform a play? Wow.

“The irony here is that ‘Chicago’ is about women who commit murder and go to jail, but if you are beautiful enough and you have enough money, and especially if you have the press on your side – in this case the Daily News – you will get what you want,” -(legitimate) “Chicago” producer Barry Weissler

That was my dinner tonight. Frozen entree with an indian theme. It was actually pretty good. I felt like I was compromising by buying frozen dinners, but with some ethnic flavor. I also got some jeans for 6.97 at Old Navy. I love Old Navy.

I think I may be the only one still in the office, so I’m listening to Barlow Girl, courtesy of Larissa’s myspace page and singing out loud.

Something about the importance of making cartoons, I think.
Okay, the best part of this video is “England sucks, I mean, no one would live in England if they had a choice, right?”
Here’s the Great Immigration Debate of 1621.
It’s kinda like this would be funny if they weren’t trying to make a point. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out what point they were trying to make, either. I need comments.

If you haven’t heard President Bush showed up at the White House Correspondent’s dinner alongside impersonator Steve Bridges.
George Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Association
Let me know if you find a download of this anywhere. YouTube is too dang slow.

I very accidentally found this video hosted at Rocketboom. I don’t know anything about it, but it’s cool.
(this would surely get me arrested on the DC Metro)

I’m pre-approved for an American Express with no annual fee and a free rewards program!
I must really be coming up in the world

Here’s the second nerdy post of the weekend. After installing my RAID controller (it’s the red PCI card with my two SATA connectors running into it above), I decided the fan on my graphics card was too loud. So I went to CompUSA to get a new fan and came back with this. Definately quieter than a fan, this enormous heat sink has no moving parts and looks totally geeky! This’ll do until I get the water cooling system to replace my other 5 fans.

About a year ago I bought my first SATA hard disk. I spent about a week trying to copy everything from my old disk to that one and make it boot. No luck. Then I found Casper XP from Future Systems. Casper XP will make an entire backup of whatever disk you have to whatever other disk you have (be it larger, smaller, different interface, even connected by USB), that is bootable so you can swap in the copy and continue working from the new disk. After the hassle I had been through, I thought it would be worth the $50 purchase to finally get my disk working without having to reinstall everything. With Casper XP, 5 minutes of configuration and an hour of disk activity, I did what I could not do in an entire week without it. I was satisfied with my purchase.
Since then, I’ve been using Casper XP to make scheduled backups of my entire hard disk. It’s nice to know that if my disk ever fails, I can just put in my backup drive and in five minutes loose no more than 2 days worth of changes.
Just today I tried to install a RAID controller and a second SATA hard disk, but before reconfiguring anything, I made sure I had a current backup from Casper onto my external drive. In the process of configuring my RAID drives, my primary disk became unreadable. No problem! I just swapped in my backup disk and I’m up and running again in no time! I’m pretty excited about the way Future Systems keeps saving me from myself.
I just wish they had a product that would keep me from cutting myself while shaving.