South Park recently aired it’s 200th & 201st episodes. The plots were full of classic South Park references highlighting some of the funniest – and most irreverent – situations of the show’s fourteen season history. A subplot of these episodes revisited a storyline about an appearance by The Super Best Friends, a parody super-hero group of the world’s religious icons Jesus, Buddha, Joseph Smith, Moses, and Muhammad. As it did on a previous occasion, Comedy Central censored the Muhammad character for fear of backlash from the Muslim community. While preventing the Islamic backlash, Comedy Central came under heavy fire by others defending the creator’s – and viewer’s – First Amendment rights. (Read more about the fallout here.)

I’m a season pass holder of South Park over at the iTunes Store. While Apple initially made episode 200 available to subscribers, it was ultimately pulled and episode 201 never made an appearance. This sparked a bit of outrage of my own resulting in the creation of the following review:

As a Season Pass holder of South Park for many years now, I find it highly disappointing that recent episodes “200″ and “201″ have not been made available through the iTunes store. Whether this is a decision made by Comedy Central or Apple, the unnecessary level of censorship supported by both companies is disheartening. While South Park episodes have been readily available for free (both by Comedy Central and other avenues on the Internet) I have been an ardent supported of paying for quality television. My reward for this support? Two companies deciding for me that I’m not intelligent enough to understand the satirical use of a religious figure as a cartoon character. I call on both Comedy Central and Apple to immediately release episodes “200″ and “201″ via the iTunes store or issue an immediate refund of my Season Pass payment. This is neither “uncensored” nor “complete” as promised.

(The rant is currently the highest ranked review for South Park: Season 14 on the iTunes store and has received 162/163 positive feedback! Whoa!)

Last night I received the following email from Apple:

Dear John,

Thank you for purchasing a Season Pass for South Park, Season 14. Episodes “200″ and “201″ are currently not available for download. We do not know if Comedy Central will make these episodes available at a later date.

We appreciate your understanding and have issued two free video credits to your account.

While ultimately not what I asked for it does highlight the source of the censorship to be Comedy Central. From the network which has promoted a show with a history such as South Park, the nightly social commentary of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, and at one time allowed Dave Chappelle to dominate it’s airwaves, this is so extremely disappointing. It’s not as if the parodied character Matt Stone and Trey Parker were drawing was doing anything other than standing there and being present (as opposed to say, Buddha doing lines of cocaine)

So if Comedy Central doesn’t have the guts to show to a cartoon character of the prophet Muhammad standing around doing nothing, someone should.

Trying to build a list with such an air of superiority titled “best albums” or “best songs” of the year seems to pretentious. Not that it really stopped me last year, but I digress… It feels like a better approach to this time around is to go over my favorite albums and live performances I caught through the year. It truly has been fantastic on all fronts, so let’s just get into it… (more…)

This evening I was preparing the house for visitors over the holiday. My media shelves in the living room were in bad shape with CDs & DVDs stacking up. I started rummaging through a spindle of old discs and came across an item that made me pause a moment.

A year ago we lost a good friend named Phil Palousek. There’s a lot to say about Phild0g, especially how much he is missed. I thought it would be great to let Phil speak for himself in a way he did most of the time… with a mix CD.

I checked Phil’s site over at WaxDJ and didn’t find this mix. So it seems appropriate as we remember him now around Christmas that I share my find.

Click here to download Phild0g’s Grinch Beats

We miss you, Phil.

Yet another update from beyond.

If you’re still reading here, know that I’m more active on Twitter/Facebook now. Twitter (ignoring @’s and RT’s) feeds Facebook status. I respond to replies on both.

I stopped paying for my LiveJournal account. Made sense as I wasn’t posting directly there any longer. If you see this on LJ, you’re seeing it as an RSS feed from my blog.

I resisted for a long time the idea of putting out ideas in 140 characters. It seemed rather odd that information of value could be conveyed in such a short manner. I’m finding trying to construct information in as tight a bundle as possible but still make it useful is good for brain. It helps in my job which requires I break down something complex – to someone who doesn’t understand – into a couple of sentences they can take back to their respective people.

These short messages though are very helpful. Time is not as available as it used to be. But more importantly, I think I actually really understand a bit more about why it helps to be that quick. If you’ve read my writings since I first started on LiveJournal in 2004 you’ll remember I wrote “News Bits” every few days. It was just links and a comment. I’d usually do four or five in a day. These were really just one liners to things I thought were interesting but not worth the time for a full entry. One liner + link = tweet.

I couldn’t have explained all this in 140 characters.

This will mark Day 4 of my attempt to write this entry. It’s been almost two months since my last entry and it’s a bit challenging to get something put together. It’s time to just brain dump…

Promotion… I got a big fat one. I’ve now got a Senior title and 20 people reporting to me. (That’s up from 5!) I’ve known about it for a few months now, but actually being in the role is certainly more stressful than I anticipated. My previous role was primarily support of any services related to our Media website. These days I not only own website operations but the back end as well: Oracle DBs, ESB, leads processing, ad forecasting, payroll services, and more.

Colie is back in SF for work. She’ll be there for the better part of the year. Still adjusting. I miss that girl something fierce. The add load of the promotion isn’t helping, I think. I feel like John Adams without his Abigail. I tried talking through the day with my cat but her feedback and advice isn’t that sound.

Heading to Hawaii next week. We’ll be there for 7 days. The vacation is perfectly timed to help me with my stress. It’s going to be fun I’m sure but I’m having a pretty hard time seeing through the next day or two ahead of me at the moment.

My brother flies into town the 1st week of July. Really looking forward to having him home for a week. Yet again, something that’s hard to see through the next few days ahead of me.

So I’ve managed to get through it. Now I should stop procrastinating and get that initiative proposal and annual reviews I’ve been stalling on completed.

Woooooosah!

I woke up Monday morning and found my iMac completely frozen. Reseting the power resulted in a gray screen. Continuously gray, never moving on to display an Apple logo. Shit.

Popping in system DVD I am again staring a blank gray screen. Uh oh.

When I get home from work I pull the extra memory I added. No dice. Damn, this is pretty bad.

I try some of the Apple startup hotkeys to reset the pram, do an optional startup disk, and target the system as a firewire drive. Everything ultimately pointed a problem with the hard drive. What was most frustrating though was a hard drive problem really shouldn’t prevent OS X DVDs from booting.

My iMac is now out of warranty and I’m pretty certain the only thing I need to do is get to the hard drive to either reformat/reinstall the OS or replace the drive altogether.

So do I take it in to the Genius Bar, wait a few days for the repair or do I take the plunge and do the dirty work myself. I’m a former certified Apple technician. I can do this!

I take the plunge and crack it open. Not an easy feat but after 30 minutes I’ve extracted the hard drive and reformatted it on my trusty MacBook. Putting the iMac back together I power it on and low-and-behold I’m now able to boot off the OS X DVDs, run hardware diagnostics, and am back in business.

My triumph doesn’t end there though. I don’t even need to reinstall the OS. I just boot off the install DVD, select Restore from backup and in three hours my system is perfectly restored to where it was an hour before I awoke to find it dead on Monday morning.

Glorious day!

There’s a delicate balance in management. Understanding what those who report to you do and what they know is important. But is understanding everything required? The more complex the issue, the greater the difficulty in understanding everything about that subject.

Good leaders surround themselves with subject matter experts (SME) who provide them what are expected to be well informed, thoughtfully considered recommendations on their area of expertise. The leader takes this information and along with the information from their other SMEs formulate a decision on the matter at hand.

Good leaders acknowledge when they’ve miscalculated the response. Bad leaders will blame the SMEs, but a good leader knows they are the ones ultimately responsible because they let the SME persuade their decision.

So today President Obama said this:

This says, Mr. President, that you are surrounding yourselves with the wrong people. Timothy Geithner is ineffective and improperly advising you. You are the president and you are responsible. So do something about it already.

You’re gone. As suddenly as you came to me
Like nightfall followed dawn without a day between
You’re gone and suddenly I can’t see
I’m in the shadow of you
I can see you in my minds rose-tinted eye..
Somewhere you’re drifting by
Your heels rolling sparks on the lucky street

You are the light
You have the day
I have the night
But we have the early hours
We have the early hours
We have the early hours together

- Steve Hogarth, You’re Gone

How does a talk radio host hold the entire conservative movement hostage?

LAPD has released it’s most “most wanted” list. What does it say about me that I immediately go to see if my father is on the list? Add in their my surprise that he’s not.

(And in three sentences I’ve managed to give you a huge insight into a lot of parts of my personality…)