(I posted this recently on a forum and thought I would replicate here)
Conspiracy theorists usually feel a need to differentiate themselves from the mainstream by holding opinions that contradicts "official" explanations, mostly because they think it's fashionable to be seen to be "not a sheep". Also could be taking a gamble on the prospect that when the "truth" is finally revealed, they can look smarter compared to the masses.
Commonly seen to be endlessly watching or making "documentaries" and absorbing, sheep-like, every detail that could possibly provide an explanation as to why the "official" explanation is wrong. Most arguments hinge either around flawed science, or the reasoning that because something isn't fully explained to their satisfaction, everything else is lies.
Sadly, it's never going to stop being "fashionable" for these people to feel like they're on the inside of a big secret. The shallowness of conspiracy theorists is demonstrated as they question everything simply in order to gain perceived status within their audience as someone who "thinks differently", "is his(her) own person", "doesn't take crap from governments". They believe such qualities allows them to get laid sooner, and with more people.
Unfortunately, in most cases, the glaring lack of logic and reason only makes them appear to be closed-minded geeks trying to cling onto some sort of individualism to make themselves seem important. It's sad, but it's true.
Well, last night was interesting - I knew that Electric Six had just started a US tour and their night in NY was last night, at the Bowery Ballroom.
It didn't really start off well when I went to the ATM to get cash. An amnesia fit meant that I managed to block my card, thus leaving me without any ability to get cash. No cash = no taxi to venue. After a subsequent spate of lateral thinking, I managed to make use of a phone and a credit card to get what I needed. After that, things went well. The venue was tiny, about half the size of anything I'd been to before - which meant that the keen people (like me) actually got to lean on the stage. No crowd control and no silly European noise restrictions = good gig. They even let me play some notes at the end (it got quite silly). Not sure if that counts as fulfilling my ambition to play bass loudly on a stage somewhere somehow before I'm 40. Probably not....
It's 11:30, and I just got up. Sundays are a wonderful thing :-)
Unfortunately, I seem to have caught that nasty bug again - I keep buying stuff. This is fine and good, because I can afford it. It's also fine and good becase things in this country are about 50% the price that they are in the UK. For example, if I were to buy a Samsung 244T 24" widescreen TFT in the UK, it would cost me about £700. If I buy it here, it costs $750, which is about £400. My current monitor is getting a bit senile now, so it would naturally make sense to get a new one.
On a similar theme, I bought an mp3 player. When the ipod nano first came out, I thought "That's a good idea - if that were 4-6Gb and cost less than £100 and wasn't made by Apple, I'd buy it". Sadly, it was more than £100 and made by Apple. However! Fast forward to today and the number 2 in the mp3 player market is Sandisk who make, amongst other things, flash memory. This means they can enter the flash memory mp3 player market and undercut everyone (Apple) because they don't need to buy the memory chips. So they made this which is a rather small (nano sized) 6Gb flash player. It's got a better screen than the nano, a user-replaceable battery, radio and most importantly: drag and drop copying of songs.
I used to have a Rio Carbon but it broke and the bastards refused to fix it. Anyway, the thing I loved about that was that you could plug it in and it would show up in Windows (or whatever OS you wanted to use that day) as a removable flash drive. So you can just copy stuff across, unplug it, and play files. Now, I hate iTunes. I hate the idea of being tied to one particular program on one particular PC to copy music to a place where I'm going to listen to it. So I wanted something similar with any mp3 player I bought. I found that the e270 can do this and it only cost me $179, which is about £95.
Success! A 6Gb flash-based mp3 player for under £100 which does nice drag-drop file copying. I had a few initial problems, where it wouldn't recognise the ID3 tags on half my music, but I solved that by deleting all the tags and recreating them. Now I just need to find out where to buy that monitor from, and then I'm all set :)