Ramblings of Dan Leubitz
I am Dan Leubitz.

Under SOPA, you could get 5 years for uploading a Michael Jackson song, one year more than the doctor who killed him… SOPA is a perfect example of legislation born from ignorance and reactive behavior. Yes, piracy is wrong.. but was it wrong when we were children dubbing tapes in a boom box or making mix tapes for our girlfriends. It is high time that the music and video business understand that a government that charges %100 tax and a government that charges 0% tax collect the same amount. When music is affordable, when cable is offered ala-carte so you don’t pay for 50 channels you don’t watch.. people will embrace the payment structure.. More on this to come..

(UPDATE: This is an interactive post, please click on the links to hear some of the music mentioned)

As a youth, I was never exposed to smokers, drinkers or anything that would dare be titled rebellious  or wild.  My father listened to classical  music and bad early 80′s music

while he air drummed on his steering wheel.  My mother seemingly went along with the choice of music in the house , which later  can only be defined as a form of torture. ( I actually had to use sound hound  to hum the sheena easton song as i couldn’t recall the name.. but after 30 years.. that song still plays in loops in my head).

It was through their enjoyment  of chazanut and really poor 80′s music that my music preferences were born.

It started with Metallica, and Alice Cooper.. moved into depeche mode, and duran duran and U2.  My music and my poster ridden walls were looked at by my family as curious and perhaps rebellious.

During the Metallica phase..I grew my hair out long in the back ( no not a mullet) collected skulls, drew gothic themed art and pottery in high school and read books about slightly morbid topics.  As my mother put it ” we are letting him explore himself.. and pray to the good lord this stops”.  It eventually did.. as i realized there was probably little chance of me getting.. err… finding a girlfriend in this phase.

As a sophomore in public high school.. i began my rapid fire dating.  Music stamped every event mad teenage event, every emotional life or death teenage drama. Sinead O’conner to this day brings back the memory of a girl Jodi F i was chasing.. who i went to a party  and saw her with someone else. I was devastated.. and yet some 20 years later the song can bring back the entire scene in vivid detail.

Highschool homecoming, i took this cute catholic girl Dawn from some distant school.. i don’t remember much about her.. other then the back seat of a some poor unfortunate souls car and the music by the Nelsons.

Later on I was armed with a girlfriend ( whom i dated well in to college.).. which we shared the same teenage drama and music of course stamped each and every drama.  Upon one massive, break up the cliche song from Say Anything   in your eyes  was on top of the play list.. ( i recall i even changed my outgoing voicemail with that music.. ya. i did that) Other music from INXS and NIN dotted this relationship.

Toad the Wet Sprocket  to this day gives me the heebejeebees .. lets just say a concert that went terribly wrong that ended up with my brother Ben posting bail for me on a 1st degree felony that i found myself facing.

When the highschool sweetheart scenario took a sudden end..  music became painful and there was literally cd’s i was unable to listen to Counting Crows being one of them.

Post college, Jamiroquai always brings a smile to my face, again a from a very intense emotional situation.

With Andi, I really never asked her which songs played a part in her life.. but perhaps that will be a subject for her blog MomaSutra.. but through out our marriage  we discover music together, and most of the time the music is enjoyed not for the emotional history of the music,, but the fact that we can enjoy the same music. Maybe that is what my parents were doing with that awful music.. perhaps that is what we all do.. when we see something nice, smell something nice.. we always want to share that with ones we love.. and without the drama of the music from our past, we appreciate the music because it was enjoyed together.

The TRS-80 was to me a technological wonder. It was a taste of what I saw on the Starship Enterprise minus the beeping buzzing and Ahura in mini skirt.  I was all of 8 or 9 when i began programming this marvelous machine using BASIC

10 cls

20 Print “Wow TRS 80 is the coolest.

30 if X=”no it isnt” then line 50 if x= “damn straight” then 60

40 end

50  print ” Why, you dont like savign data on tape cassettes?”

55 end

60 print ” RADIO SHACK RULES”

oh yes. and for my programming masterpieces that i wished to run again, i would save them to a tape cassette which when played back on my BOOM BOX sounded like AOL connecting.

My father kept up with the times, but failed to recognize the potential in investing in the companies of the computers he purchased.

One spring day we opened a Tandy PC..then shortly there after the Apple IIc.  I can recall the apple logo on the vanilla machine whos top came off like a hood of a car. I recall the world which opened up when we installed aa 30Bps modem, i recall the excitement of  upgrading from a 30 baud modem to 60 then to 120..

these were days when US Robotics wasnt a company that appeared in Sci-fi movies.. but was as exciting company on the cutting edge of delivering hi quality transfers using x-modem z-modem and a few other protocols i fail to recall.

The Apple was soon replaced with a PC and a CGA monitor.. which was upgraded to EGA monitor then VGA.. VGA+  and the modem speed buzzing at 19.2.  BBS’s were all the rage.. and I opened up one of the first BBS’s in cleveland called “City Morgue” and I..well. i was called The Coroner…

I had 2 lines running into a teleguard BBS system..which patched in every evening to allow local mail to be transmitted to other sister BBS’s. This early internet was very personal.. and quite private.. and stood up against major corporate systems like CompuServe and FreeServe… oh the days..

As PC’s were getting faster, the windows installation disks  became more numerous, I recall installing windows 3.1 with a 30 or 50 disk set.. and cursing when the install failed requiring me to restart from the beginning.  Brands became less important then what you had inside.. i recall a pal of mine Dan F. whos father raised the bar of cutting edge to a whole new level. It was as it house that i was able to be exposed to things the Computer Shopper teased me with at prices i was only able to dream about.

I had a white box PC with a square label with some rinky dink company who secured the privilege of assembling the parts for me.. later on in life.. i was that square.  The pride in ones PC was similar to that of hobby car enthusiasts.. well in my circles anyway. My highschool sweet heart wasnt too fond of this attachment or my circles.. or vague sexual references to floppy and hard drives.  As they say.. thats is how i rolled..

Today. I am always fascinated with the attachments we have to brands..this attachment is almost sheepish or lemming in some cases. Apple has become the marketing brand king of kings… which given its vanilla box beginnings, still makes me grin.

I drank from the Apple water with the 1st Mac-Mini ;drawn to Apple OS as I became tired of dealing with tech-support when I got home after a long day of PC & Network support.  Once I became comfortable with the OS.. a long line of APPLE products followed… Ipod’s Iphones.. Macbook Pro’s  and most recently the Iphone 4.   Who was I? Why wasn’t i even giving other brands or models a fair shot? I bought my recent Macbook without even exploring what else was on the market.. The coroner would have taken me to task on this.

In the last year i have begun to diversify my tech portfolio.. Instead of an Apple TV.  I purchased a Boxee.   Instead of an IPAD2  a MOTOROLA XOOM (Wi-Fi)
. I began to look under the hood again.. and it feels great.  The reward for my breaking out of the normalcy bias is only to my benefit.

The Boxee Box by D-Link is by far the best TV appliance on the market..well at least better then Apples product.. i am able to scan my local media collection, play almost any format.. use my iphone or Xoom as a remote… and stream from any thousand of sources. Where Apple only streams from 3rd party and would like to ignore the local video collection I have collected.

The Xoom as a competitor to a market leader has to make good on specs if it is to succeed..and that it does…toe to toe the Xoom wifi has GPS, Larger Display ,HD cameras..and better insides. The GUI takes the Iphones Grid GUI.. and turns it on its head.. allowing me to see content without having to touch .. anything.  Icons with content.. imagine that.

Yes ..It is missing about 50,000 fart apps.. but a quick scan through Droid markplace shows a decent collection that will do just fine.  So I have now decided to make a list of  consumer products that will allow people wrapped up in Apple… to worm themselves out.  I will be releasing my findings in the near future.. but I am excited about what I find.

In the mean time, I watch my child play on my iphone and wonder what he will write in 15 years as he recalls his fathers silly Iphone.

Tune in to see The Balancing Act, featuring Michael Cutler Co Carrots and onions. Also featuring my wife Andi Leubitz

The extreme fringe US based, soros, and arab state funded J-street, has stepped up its rhetoric and methods to attempt to splinter US support for Israel. This focus is straight out of Bin-Ladens play books as Osama was quoted this week  “The time has come for you to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby.”

Yet we know Osamas words are not thrown in the wind and usually followed up or preceded with ground work, to allow these statements to take hold.  It is quite possible that j-streets  financing from ” Lebanese-American businessman Richard Abdoo, a current board member of Amideast and a former board member of the Arab American Institute (AAI), and Genevieve Lynch, who is also a member of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) board.” source was encouraged to do get involved in splintering the US support by statements like Osamas.

One thing is certain, j-streets own website attempts to confuse readers  with biased, poorly researched opnions passed off as fact.

One example:

http://www.jstreet.org/page/settlements

“Israel’s settlements in the occupied territories have, for over forty years, been an obstacle to peace. They have drained Israel’s economy, military, and democracy and eroded the country’s ability to uphold the rule of law.”

The above line is what Fatah would like us to believe, but is tantamount to saying Arab Birth rates in Israel are an obstacle to peace.  The settlements were never the obstacle,  the rants from the Palestinains have always said from haifa to Jaffa, to the hebron to the gallilee , palestine will be liberated, for 40 years, Israel , not the settlements, have been the obstacle to peace according to the arab mainstream .

The Settlements today, are the only encouragement for palestinians to create a lasting peace, the longer they wait to agree to peaceful terms the more facts on the ground will exists that will cut into their future state.  The palestinians know they have a timer that encourages israel to act, in the form of super high birthrate that can change the demographics of the state. The longer israel waits, the larger the problem, yet to ask them to curb their birthrate, or to call that an obstacle is a terrible thing to say outloud. To ask israel to curb settlements and natural growth is equally as absurd.  It would seem that these two time based bombs may be the only carrot to bring this area to order.

Why then would j-street advocate freezing settlements without a SINGLE motion from the arab leaders to lay ground work for peace. J-street knows, as does its sponsors, that once israel freezes settlements, it handicaps israels leverage, and forces israel to act out of time based concerns not security based concerns. This is how Oslo failed.   J-street would like obama to press Israel into a corner, and keep them there until it looses any upper hand it could have within the media, public opinion, and negotiaions.

J-street is as far from supporting Israels interest as Bin-Laden is.. and no doubt Osama is pushing directly or indirectly those who can donate quietly to j-street to do so. When the Romans were knocking down the gates of Jerusalem, jews were behind the gate fighting, J-street would seem to be the extreme left, anti-israel Trojan Horse.