In what might be one of the stupidest rulings I have ever heard of as it pertains to internet law, a Kentucky judge ruled that 141 domain names be transferred from internet gambling sites to Kentucky officials.

This is completely worthless on so many levels — the US does not own or regulate the internet, let alone Kentucky! Can you imagine if other countries started regulating what was available on the internet and seizing domain names? The idea that a state in the US can regulate a site that has an international audience is beyond absurd.

Also, this will not stop or hinder internet gambling in the least. Gambling sites use programs that you download in order to access their services. These programs do not rely on the domain names that are being seized, but are pointed to IP addresses of specific servers. Seizing the domain names isn’t going to stop anyone from continuing to gambling using software they have already downloaded. At most it will prevent new people from downloading the software for a very short amount of time — until the company puts everything on a new domain name. OK — you seized gambling.com, I’ll put everything on gambling.net, or gambling.cc, or gambling-stuff-here-download-it-now.com.

Judge Wingate demonstrated his complete ignorance of technology when he said that he would be willing to exempt any gambling site that would use “geographically filtering” to block Kentucky residents. It is trivial to use a proxy server in your browser to circumvent any attempt to geographically filter users — Google “proxy servers” and you’ll see how many are out there to use — many for free.

Politicians and lawmakers need to realize that you cannot apply old-school laws and practices to new technology. The internet is a global phenomenon and we can’t regulate how Japan, China, or other international countries utilize it. I think it’s funny how much money and effort China pours into “censoring” the internet. I’m sure that they do a pretty good job of wiping the majority of what they don’t want seen on major sites, but if you think that there aren’t some Chinese computer geeks that know enough about encryption and internet protocols to get to whatever they want to see, you’re kidding yourself.

Information and knowledge was always meant to be free … the internet is making that a reality and will eventually overcome all obstacles that those in power want to put in the way of citizens that just want to live free!

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Haven’t done one of these in a while and I know that Brendan doesn’t know what to buy unless I tell him, so here’s this month’s Mad Skillz!!!

I got some free music courtesy of Avis and it wasn’t on iTunes (boooo!) — however, since it was on eMusic I got to browse around for some artists that I really didn’t know. In the process I found Bo Hagon — never heard of him before and he’s not being played a lot right now, but has a great sound… Bet he will be topping the charts soon!

If you don’t like rap you’ll just have to stick to country for now, but if you do, enjoy…

1) Do It 4 The Hood - Bo Hagon

2) Out Here Grindin’ - DJ Khaled

3) Money Cars B*tches - Bo Hagon

4) I’m So Hood - DJ Khaled

5) Been Gettin Money - Bo Hagon

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You might have thought I’d forgotten about piano or given up on it since I haven’t posted in a while since I first bought my keyboard, but I’ve been enjoying playing over the last seven months quite a bit. When I first got the piano and some classical music books I have to admit that it looked a little intimidating! Over time though, taking things one step at a time, it wasn’t that hard.

It is really fun to learn a piece and then get to enjoy it and then really learn it. When I play I don’t read the music. Well, I do the first time until I learn the song, but once I learn the notes I just play. I guess you could call that memorization, but that sounds a little too rote for something like playing the piano, especially a piece by Beethoven.

Once I’ve got the notes down it’s so much more fun to play and to focus on how the piece is supposed to sound — the tempo and dynamics of the piece — and just let everything fall into place. In fact, I find that when I am trying to concentrate on what part comes next, what I am about to play, etc., I mess up. When I just relax and play without thinking everything just seems to fall into place — and I can just sit back and listen!

So, I hope that you enjoy listening as much as I have enjoyed learning and playing this piece…

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Well, it looks like our little “Hurrication” to Chappell Hill is going to come to an end sooner rather than later. Rumors are that we got power back tonight! We are in the front of the Woodlands and there are still a lot of areas without power, so we are pretty lucky to be one of the first.

Still, we’ll probably hang out up here for a few more days as Houston gets a little more back to normal — it’s pretty comfortable up here and the evacuation manager has yet to kick us out!

Monday we chilled out most of the day — getting a little work in alongside a healthy dose of Ike updates through the local news and interwebs. Then we headed out to the Brenham airport to a cool little cafe they have there. We ate outside and it was gorgeous — the weather was amazing!

As Mamoo would say, “It’s five o’clock somewhere!” — and it was about 2pm, so some Amber Bock seemed appropriate! The burgers and onion rings were great!

My dad just bought a new Lincoln town car and it is the super long edition. Like the Town Cars that you ride to the airport in. It is pretty sweet, but as a joke on the way from the restaurant, Carrie and I both jumped in the back and made him chauffeur us around town!!! LOL

We did complain about the lack of Kleenex in the back armrest. No complimentary water either!

Note the “Front Pass Seat” button that allows you to move the front passenger seat up…

…nice legroom!

We’ve enjoyed the time up here and this is probably the easiest evacuation anyone has ever done!

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We made it through the storm ok - at least as far as safety and house issues are concerned. Brendan didn’t fare quite so well!

Ike didn’t really hit the Woodlands until about 3:30am on Friday night. We didn’t lose power until about an hour later. The next day we drove around a bit to check things out — Carrie took a few photos — and no one had any power. HEB was open with a few lights on, but they were out of ice by the time we got there, which is really the only reason we stopped. There were people coming out of the store with ice, but we had gotten there just a little too late!

No worries — we mostly had what we needed at home. We also didn’t have any internet access on our phones, so I was getting very little information about what was going on. A little after midnight on Saturday I turned on my phone (I had been turning it completely off to conserve the battery) and started reading a few stories about the storm and aftermath. Over 4.5 million in the Houston area without power and officials were saying it could be up to four weeks before it was completely restored!

I also texted with my sister, Natalie, who was in Vegas for the weekend (smart evacuation plan!) — she told me that my parents house in Chappell Hill (a little over an hour from us) had power. The next morning when I woke up (about 7:30am — very early for me!) and still didn’t have power I said, “Get up Carrie — we’re going to Chappell Hill!”

We were on the road by about 9am and the roads were pretty clear. We took 45 south to the Beltway around to 290 — sometimes we go 1488, but there was no way I was taking back roads! There were two gas stations open that entire route that we saw. One off 45 just south of the Woodlands that had a HUGE gas line — about 80 cars deep — that extended to the feeder road. Another one was open off 290 and Barker Cypress and had lines stretching across the 290 overpass with cars waiting to fill up!

The first one apparently also had a line just for those filling up portable gas containers, which was shown on Chron.com below:

We didn’t get any damage to our house — save for a bit of water being forced under our balcony door, which soaked the carpet a bit and did cause a few wet spots on the downstairs ceiling. Hopefully that will just dry up and it should be ok.

Friday night we kept hearing this banging / popping noise and could not figure out what it was as almost everything had been taken off the streets in preparation for Ike. We found out the next day when we looked across the street to the Pavilion — it had been completely ripped apart — and the covering being snapped in the winds were what that noise had been all night!

This is how it used to look…

…and after Ike…

The main issue for us is no power. Up in the Woodlands we are on Entergy, as opposed to CenterPoint which most of Houston uses. The bad news is that Entergy was badly affected by the storm with 150 major transmission lines damaged. By noon today Centerpoint had restored power to about half a million customers, with 1.6 million still remaining without power. Entergy, on the other hand, shows under 9,000 restored out of 392,000 — or just about 2%!

All reports that I have read about Entergy and power being restored to the Woodlands and nearby areas have used weeks as the measurement. Some, including the Conroe Mayor, say two weeks and others have said up to four weeks. So, it looks like we are going to get used to some Chappell Hill living for a while!

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