So I went test dri­ving cars this past week­end. One of the cars I sam­pled was a Honda Civic. The 2006 redesign is one slick puppy I must admit. Accel­er­a­tion, han­dling, and respon­sive­ness are top notch for a car in this class. Unbe­liev­ably, my tall frame can actu­ally fit in the back­seat. Plus it sips gas, an all impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion, now more so given ris­ing gas prices. It has an impres­sive list of stan­dard fea­tures and it pretty much comes down to not which pack­age but which trim you want—whether it be the one of the three stan­dard trims, the eco-friendly hybrid (though the Prius is still the reign­ing king in this class), or the sporty Si. There are avail­able options for cus­tomiz­ing the trim even fur­ther, but other than fog lights, many are sim­ply super­flu­ous. Yet, since I’ve been con­sid­er­ing the Mazda3, the MazdaSpeed3 and the Sub­aru WRX, I found it rather odd that a 5-door Civic was lack­ing in Honda’s line-up. I cer­tainly recall a 5-door being avail­able in past iter­a­tions. It’s not that Honda doesn’t make them, it’s that they don’t sell them to North Amer­ica. WTF, Honda?!

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I was a big fan of Tril­lian because dur­ing my 15 year his­tory of using the internet—it’s even longer if you count my bulletin-board days—I’ve acquired mul­ti­ple IM accounts from dif­fer­ent providers. I’m in the process of tran­si­tion­ing my mul­ti­ple com­put­ers away from pro­pri­etary OSes that aren’t nec­es­sar­ily worth the money spent. (That’s not to say there aren’t OSes worth pay­ing for.) How­ever, since Tril­lian is plat­form depen­dent, it was out. I needed a multi-network IM client that would work on mul­ti­ple plat­forms. Enter Pid­gin. It fit all my needs, except…

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“May Day” is exactly what Digg is exclaim­ing right now. Any­one who’s a reg­u­lar reader of Digg, Slash­dot and the like knows, users are doing noth­ing short of revolt­ing against DRM and respond­ing to—what peo­ple say is uncalled for—censorship (even if its in a site’s power to mod­er­ate the user-posted con­tent). They’re flood­ing Digg with links to ever more cre­ative expres­sions of the access key for unlock­ing HD-DVDs. The MPAA might as well just throw in the towel and either gen­er­ate a new key, develop a new copy-protection scheme (that will get defeated sooner or later), or just fol­low the music industry’s lead and phase out DRM all together. By try­ing to squash this infor­ma­tion, all they’ve done is pub­li­cize it even more. When they say that if it gets on the inter­net it stays on the inter­net, they mean it.