Some thoughts on the newer Sansa plugin

I recently upgraded the firmware for my almost-dead Sansa e250 music player, and it has its advantages/disadvantages. The good thing is that hopefully it'll be more stable and not freeze up like the older version did. Also for my songs with multiple collaborating performers that are entered on Windows Media Player's media library simultaneously, the new firmware displays all their names, as in "Artist1/Artist2/Artist3", "Artist#" representing a name. That way the other performers get the credit they deserve, like let's say T-Pain for Kanye West's "Good Life". However my e250 now responds slower in reaction upon pressing buttons. But for now I can survive, but I still need to find Nas' Illmatic and It Was Written - I can't live without those hip hop golden age era works from perhaps the most talented MC out there! But thankfully I still have NWA's Straight Outta Compton, all my Metallica songs, and all my rare death metal songs too.

I murdered my MP3 Player today...

...after it just refused to start up. After formatting it based on a blog suggestion I ended up losing a lot of my favourite music since I use my Sansa E250 MP3 Player as primary backup since I was trying to save disk space on my slowing-down computer. Here's a random list I could pull out of my head tonight--and it'll just keep getting bigger--of albums/songs I need to re-download:
* Freedom Writers soundtrack (it has some great old school hip hop cuts, trust me)
* The Game - Doctor's Advocate
* Nas - Illmatic; It Was Written
* Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero; The Slip
* The Roots - Game Theory; Phrenology; "Distortion 2 Static" (from Do You Want More?!); "Don't Say Nuthin'" (from The Tipping Point);
* Wu-Tang Clan - Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

Quick follow-ups

- I sincerely apologise for my previous smear article about school. That's what happens when I get mad. I just go on my computer and damage a small portion of the Internet. Because honestly, I don't want to damage the real world and become the next Seung-Hui Cho.
- And my parents decided against taking the ACT since I'm already way too familiar with the SAT and I need to focus on real stuff like growing up and the personal statement. I hope that Mr West goes over 'em tomorrow in addition to reviewing George Orwell's 1984 - a pretty damn good novel right there!

Everything that's wrong with Evergreen Valley High School

Well, an hour ago I got home from the EVHS football team's embarrassing Homecoming Game loss to Independence High School, 22-21. That came after the EV Cougars were leading 21-14 with about 10 seconds left in the 4th quarter, when suddenly defense slipped up in the rainy weather and allowed an Independence player to score a touchdown (6 points) and a 2-point conversion, thus concluding the game at that. At the same time, we learned that the Juniors got 1st place at homecoming and Seniors 2nd (and of course, Sophomores 3rd and Freshmen 4th). And the Associated Student Body (ASB for short) invested lots of valuable money and had its president testify before the District in its September board meeting for a permit for halftime fireworks tonight. Wow. In a time when the economy is sucking so bad it's under Great Depression status and public schools from Puget Sound to the Rio Grande to the Florida Keys are strapped in cash and raped in the behind by President Bush's incompetent No Child Left Behind Act, it is simply a disgrace for a school that was recently ranked silver by US News & World Report magazine as among the best American high schools and having led the whole damn district in API (Academic Performance Index) to look like this in what's supposed to be the happiest time of the year.

So when I got home, I laid back on my futon and watched a DVR'ed episode of The Steve Wilkos Show, whose title host is a former US Marine, Chicago Police Officer, and security director for The Jerry Springer Show. No, I'm not joking, Wilkos is the bald-headed guy you've seen on Springer since the mid-90s or so. The episode I recorded, "Tragic Tale of 2 Sisters", was from Thursday, about an 18-year-old woman who wanted Wilkos to help her 11-year-old sister stop having sex with teen boys (I'm not joking, it IS the plot of the episode). Steve Wilkos later talks with the sister & parents, who are divorced. Soon it's revealed that the father once sexually molested the older daughter, so Steve didn't let the father see the younger daughter. Meanwhile, Steve also punishes the mother for not looking out for and loving her younger, whoring daughter. In the end, the father is evicted from the stage (in Steve's popular "GET OFF MY STAGE!!!" cry) and Steve gets the mother and children counseling.

Now I'm here all angry about how low my school is sinking. Here's a rough list of everything that is wrong, wrong, incorrect, inaccurate, stupid, messed up, FUBAR, abominable, unbelievable, and silly about Evergreen Valley High School:
1. During the part of the 05-06 academic year when private colleges are asking for letters of recommendation and such, counselors were borderline deadbeat--Steve Wilkos might've beaten them up severely.
2. EVHS has acknowledged repeatedly its over-crowding controversy, but its solution--the off-campus Biotech Academy for 11th/12th graders--was killed late in 2006, thus resuming the bottleneck. This year, the overcrowding got so bad that some students were denied certain classes merely with the excuse that there wasn't enough space. One friend of mine passed the AP Calculus AB exam but was denied Calculus BC for that very reason, yet two FRESHMEN who took a shallow summer calculus I course at community college got in. And while she was repeatedly refused a seat in Calc BC, another student (a leadership student who got a 2 on the exam, a failing score) and another random student were granted space! This is affirmative action and disorganization gone WRONG. I've heard of seniors who were forced to repeat English 3 despite passing it with at least a B just because "oh, there ain't enough space". Yet I know that this year there are students in English 4 who got C/D grades in English 3.
3. EVHS made a terrible mistake by neglecting meritocracy in considering attendance priority. That's why it's more likely that a dirty ghetto kid from the borderline Mt. Pleasant/EV attendance area gets enrolled and eventually wastes our taxpayers' money by repeating Algebra 1 until eleventh grade. At the same time, a rich, hardworking student from, lessay the Silver Creek/EV attendance borderline is rejected because of..."overcrowding". Had EV used meritocracy on its borderline attendance areas, then we'd be chasing after Cupertino and Palo Alto high schools.
4. The ASB has gotten away with childish/just plain silly homecoming and battle themes.
5. An incident in November 2007 where a great mob of students hurled Skittles at each other and at staff members illustrated the students' dissatisfaction that the administration was going all North Korea on extracurricular activities. It took that much pressure for the principal to back off.
6. EVHS knowingly hired registered sex offenders in its arts programs! In November 2006, the drama teacher was arrested for sexual misconduct. Ditto with a former band teacher a couple years later. That teacher willfully allowed a registered sex offender to volunteer at the Band Boosters!!!!!!!!
7. Racism and imbalance is rampant in EVHS's course catalogue. Why can EV provide special ed yet not have foreign language classes beyond Spanish, French, and Vietnamese? Shouldn't we save our API and reputation and harbor off the special ed to Silver Creek/Mt. Pleasant for the sake of our achieving students? Also, EVHS refuses to hire a competent AP Computer Science teacher--the one right now is lying about his 67% pass rate by a HUGE margin, to be honest.
8. Gov. Ahnuld Arnold Schwarzenegger's struggle with the state budget was somehow a tolerable excuse for the school library not to be open before 6th period, but it's almost Election Day now and this still applies. Testimony from many many district parents/students/teachers was not enough either to persuade the district to finalise hours/budget for libraries!
9. I'm still angry at EV for not telling in advance that there'd be only ONE APCS section this year--so I couldn't get in AP English Language, which I planned to be a "backup" in case I didn't get APCS. When I appealed to the APLang teacher, she just gave me a "fuck you" (no, not really) and explained that I should've done the summer stuff. Still--both me and EV are equally guilty of arrogance.
10. EV has no problem with the Gay/Straight Alliance flamboyantly posting pro-gay propaganda throughout campus during "Gay Pride Week" or whatever that is. If a pro-Proposition 8 group were to come up on campus, the ICC would evict them, and if that group were ever to practice their First Amendment rights by posting their opinions in appropriate places, the Thought Police of EV would tear 'em down within minutes. Obviously, EV holds an agenda to brainwash all students with a perverted, blind message of "tolerance for all regardless or whatever" without critical thinking.

Sadly, these are only a few problems. I've got to go to sleep now. More will come later.

Goodbye SAT, hello ACT!

Well I did worse on the SAT than my previous time - a 1950 in Oct. 2008, compared to a 1990 back in May. I got the same score on the writing section (690) as last time but 20 points down on math (710 --> 690) and reading (590 --> 570). How could this happen, when I've gotten a 770 on the SAT Math level 2 subject test??!? Oh well it could be because of those pesky free-response questions or my inability to read the fine print. As for the reading section, often the reading passage questions tend to be so deceptive that only Valerie Plame could solve them...I kid you not, just ask anyone who's studied hard for the SAT (and eventually got a good or bad score).

Thus I have officially parted ways with the SAT starting today and will begin preparation for the much better and supposedly easier & more honest ACT. I picked up ACT registration materials at a college night held by my local school district and after finding my disappointing SAT score online I looked through the overview, and the ACT I think I can handle better. The ACT website (ACT.org) provides outline of the test, which goes in this order:
1. English (75 questions, 45 minutes) - questions cover both grammar and rhetoric. None of those pesky SAT "fill-in-the-blank" vocabulary questions! :D
2. Mathematics (60 questions, 1 hour) - covers most of everything from pre-Algebra to Trigonometry, similar to the SAT Subject Test in Math Level 2, again which I got a 770 score (on the 800 SAT scale)
3. Reading (40 questions, 35 minutes) - five passages organised into specific topics (i.e. humanities, sciences, literature) and multiple-choice questions. The ACT's description of this section makes it similar to the SAT reading passages section or any other reading comprehension test in general. But I hope that there are no "SAT Trick Questions" here with ambiguous answer choices
4. Science (40 questions, 35 minutes)- Unlike the SAT Subject Tests in Science, which test on the facts, the ACT Science section is more like a "scientific" version of section 3, with the main task to interpret graphs and other data based on basic scientific knowledge and reasoning.
5. Writing (optional) (1 essay, 30 minutes) - the optional and very last section of the SAT. It's a good thing that this is 5 minutes longer than the SAT essay, so I get more time to develop my ideas, something that 25 minutes hasn't given me an opportunity to do. Scholars have criticized the SAT essay section for not being reflective enough on real writing prompts that teachers normally assign.

And off to ACT prep I go! I will take the test 13 December, the last chance for me to take any SAT/ACT type test for college; deadline is 7 November (3 days after Election Day, to be easier). As I pointed out earlier, there requires extensive tutouring and "gaming the system" just to get above 2000 on the SAT! But the ACT seems more based on the facts rather than unnecessary junk "reasoning", so I hope to have a better chance there.

What's going on at the Parents Television Council? - 12 Oct 2008

To be honest, nothing much really except the weekly regulars, as the PTC's front-page press release index still expresses complaints about the 25 September episode of Survivor: Gabon with the hidden private part. But anyhow...(these were all written on 10 October 2008)
- Best Show of the Week: America's Got Talent (NBC)
- Worst Show of the Week: Bones (Fox) (not to be surprising; any crime drama will always wind up on PTC's worst section)
- Worst Cable Content of the Week: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX)
- Misrated: N/A (still not updated as of 12 September - looks like the networks are properly rating their shows!)
- TV Trends: "The Fall 2008 Season: Teens Having Sex"

Now the Best Show of the Week pick - being NBC's America's Got Talent was pretty surprising given that the show was a topic of two Worst of the Week reviews in the past (7 July 2006 and 9 August 2006) when the more "family-oriented" Regis Philbin was host. In 2007, talk show host Jerry Springer (who most of us know as the host of that controversial daytime trash talk show) came in as host. PTC didn't comment on that for 2007; 2008 comes with the third season, Springer again hosts. PTC discusses AGT in TV Trends columns (27 June 2008, 17 July 2008 and 25 July 2008) before this "Best of the Week" review, which mentions only the positive, and not negative, aspects of the show that PTC sees. I find this as an example of how PTC knows that TV shows can be a bit off-colour yet still be "family-friendly". Another example of this attitude is with ABC's Dancing With the Stars, whose 2007-2008 season finale was the Best Show of the Week just over a month after PTC put up an episode of the series as "misrated" for being "TV-PG" sans an "L" for some bleeped language.

Moving on to PTC's "Worst Show" review of Fox crime drama Bones, a show I don't watch as I prefer CBS's Cold Case, Criminal Minds, and CSI, and NBC's Law & Order. Personally I don't know how Bones is conceptually different from CSI, but if you'd like to clarify me feel free to drop me a comment and I'll think about it. Just browse through PTC's Best/Worst shows list and notice that a lot of crime dramas and medical shows get recognised for the graphic violence and other abysmal content. In this case, the reviewer asserts: "Admittedly, the rest of the show is relatively tame, but it should be noted that the series’ goriest material consistently airs at the beginning of the Family Hour." Sorry, the Family Hour is simply the product of opinion; factually the concept has been dormant for over 30 years now, and new technology like the V-Chip can block bad shows like Bones if parents don't want their kids to see that kind of show. At the end of the review, the reviewer devotes a whole paragraph to the FCC's lack of oversight over TV violence and complains that parents can't really prevent kids from seeing this show while channel-surfing. Well, that's why you look up the darn TV listings (on sites like TVGuide.com, Zap2It.com, network webpages, or your local newspaper) or set your V-Chip to block all TV-14 shows or whatever - in fact the Fox network website maintains a list of all ratings for Bones episodes seasons 1-3 (these are links to popup window pages for the old schedule format from Fox.com; the newer schedule format no longer uses this format.) But I found this press release that puts up a "TV-14-DL" rating for the episode, so I think most kids under 14 whose parents properly set up the V-Chip are safe.

PTC has tackled the issue of a "TV-14-DL" rating for Bones before; that was back in December 2007 because PTC believes that graphic imagery itself = violence. But the truth is that the V descriptor is really for violent actions not consequential images! Today I was just watching a recorded copy of a CSI: Miami episode ("Miami Confidential") that was "TV-14-DLV" and had several scenes of violence (as most CSI episodes do) to demonstrate what the criminals allegedly did and in context of police tracking down suspect. THESE are the perfect examples of rating TV shows, as PTC asks the question "So You Think You Can Rate a TV Show?"

Moving on to the Cable Worst review for the FX comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - a show I'm not too familiar with, so I won't go too deep here. PTC makes a good case for cable choice: the renewal of the series. "This past summer, FX announced that it had bought three more 13-episode seasons of Sunny beyond the current fourth, thus ensuring that the show will continue to take the most vulgar terms and turn them into storylines." But readers and parents should also note that Dirt and The Riches - both among FX's line of "edgy" TV-MA late-night dramas too risky for Fox - both got cancelled due to ratings and production troubles (especially due to the writers' strike) so I'd think twice about whether my cable bill would be subsidizing "everything" on FX. By the way, two - TWO - PTC "Seal of Approval"-winning films are to be shown on FX in coming days! Invincible, a 2006 film based on the beginning of Vince Papale's career with the Philadlephia Eagles, is to be shown Tuesday the 14th at 7:30 PM and the next day at 5:00 PM (Eastern/Pacific time, check local listings) on FX; Radio, another "football movie", is on Monday the 13th at 9PM and the next day 4:30PM. For some reason, PTC seldom reports on its "Seal of Approval" programmes shown on FX or other networks (last year FX dedicated all Thanksgiving Day to family films - and PTC was dreadfully silent). Don't forget that The Bernie Mac Show, King of the Hill, and Malcolm in the Middle are all relatively clean TV-PG sitcoms shown frequently in weekday daytime hours on FX.

Which brings me to PTC's continued silence on the cancellation of BET's Rap City (see update #2 below) or BET's syndication of Smart Guy, a show that's been on PTC's "Best Shows of the Year" list in the past. Why is it that PTC almost always is quick to report on the negatives on the cable networks yet ignores the positive (even Seal of Approval!) programming on the networks? If PTC could get more families to watch Radio or Invincible on FX maybe that'll encourage FX to lean more towards family audiences. But making sure that FX continues to schedule the usual TV-MA raunch during the 10PM hour (when it's really really hard for young children to watch) is part of PTC's strategy to put more power in the cable consumer's wallets from the Big Media. That's why parents shouldn't rely on PTC as their sole guide for TV - look up shows on the TV listings, for crying out loud! That's how I knew that FX would be showing those movies - I keep tabs on the local cable company listings on my Zap2It account even though I personally don't have cable myself, to fact-check on the PTC's biased coverage of cable TV.

And finally, to this week's TV Trends article "The Fall 2008 Season: Teens Having Sex". Programs in question include: the 15 September episode of CW's 90210 (back in 1997 PTC picked the original Fox version as among the worst shows of the year) that had the infamous "oral sex in the car" scene. That episode was rated "TV-14-DLS"; I watched the first few minutes of the show, and the scene itself, and I question if it directly implied the girl had her mouth on the boy's crotch. Then there are scenes from CW's Gossip Girl and Privileged and ABC's Private Practice (spinoff of the network's Grey's Anatomy) that seem to glorify teen sex. To demonstrate the perceived bias of Hollywood in favour of sex, the author states: "Of course, to Hollywood, sex is an activity to be indulged in without the slightest thought, and it never, ever has negative consequences. Now added to this longtime perspective is a seemingly an organized agenda on the part of the entertainment industry to convince viewers that 14-year-olds are adults, fully competent to make adult decisions about drinking, using drugs and having sexual relationships…and that the most “responsible” way of helping teens be happy is to urge them to use condoms, rather than abstaining from sexual activity for which they are not ready."

In other words, to Hollywood, abstaining from sex is uncool and boo-worthy. The author concludes: "Hollywood’s producers would no doubt hide behind the excuse that this is 'just a TV show,' and that what they show has no influence whatsoever on their teen viewers. But when top fashion designers compete to have their clothing seen on Gossip Girl, and when corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on TV commercials aimed at children and teens, such an argument seems spurious at best. TV does not force teens to engage in sexual activity; but by portraying such activity as normal and even exciting, it is definitely encouraging teens to make decisions they may regret." Yep, I've heard the "family values" people argue about TV being able to influence the kids' worldviews. But then: that's why parents talk to their kids about sex, and schools educate about protection! Here's my challenge: How can teens "regret" having sex if they've used protection and thus have less consequences? And isn't abstinence an all-too-obvious choice that the Family Values Right has been advancing way too far by spreading blatant misinformation about?

Before I leave I'd like to quickly mention that the PTC hasn't found a "misrated" TV show since Gossip Girl back in mid-September. Obviously that might mean that every TV show on since then has been properly rated. In fact, Fox network Standards & Practices seems to be reading from the PTC's playbook: The first two episodes of the new season were both "TV-14-DLSV", and the season premiere of The Simpsons was "TV-14-DLSV" (although that's a rating normally reserved for the Treehouse of Horror shows, but this episode was not). I wonder how long the PTC will continue to slack on that column, just as it did for much of 2008 with the Worst Cable Content reviews.

Follow-up (12 Oct): I just happened to realise that PTC does have "weekly picks" of the most family-friendly programmes on cable television. For the 13th and 14th I see no sign of Invincible or Radio, but for some reason PTC finds the contemporary romantic comedy You've Got Mail on ABC Family to be more "Family-friendly" than Radio on FX - is it because you don't want families' eyes to be on the same channel that produces Sons of Anarchy?

Follow-up 2: Actually the PTC issued statement to the news but for some reason not on its own website, to The Washington Times for instance. The PTC and other groups like Industry Ears/Enough is Enough issued the statement jointly - I apologise for my mistake.

The long-lost albums we've been waiting for

This morning, the Woody Show on local rock station 105.3 "Live 105" reported that Guns N' Roses's long-awaited Chinese Democracy album is finally coming out on 23 November 2008. Wikipedia cites articles from MTV News and Reuters for the date.

Meanwhile, Dr. Dre's Detox is now scheduled for sometime in December 2008, as confirmed by an official press release.