| Sunday, August 31, 2003 |
01:37 - Zzzzz...
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Just got back from a very intense day of high-school-reunion-type-stuff. Met up with the old Carpe Diem Society at Lake Mendocino, and we all went out on a party boat owned by some friends of one of our number; we drove around the lake all afternoon, picking out spots to stop the boat and dive off to swim. When I got back to the car at 6:00, I found that it had been well over 100 degrees on the lake all day. (Miraculously, I don't seem to have become sunburned.) And it still felt refreshingly chilly when I was standing on the boat deck dripping from a dip in my non-swim-trunks.
It was a blast. And I love having less than 20% humidity.
Anyway, I'm pleasantly surprised that I was able to keep myself from falling asleep on the three-hour drive back home; it was an exhilarating day, but the glucose crash at the end was pretty cataclysmic. I'm going to sleep well tonight.
See you in about, oh, fourteen hours.
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| Saturday, August 30, 2003 |
03:10 - Conservation of conservatism
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So I'm taking a brief break from my pounding out chapters in advance of my Tuesday 50% deadline to catch up on the newsgroups I follow (taking happy advantage of the new T1-- damn, but it's fun to not be fazed by 5000-line attachments anymore), and I found myself noticing something.
See, the group in question, and the demographic that I've been sidling around for the past six years or so, is one that's made up in large part of young, angst-filled, disillusioned guys of alternative sexuality who feel themselves to be alienated from the mass of humanity-- largely of their own volition. Whether in college dorms or their parents' basements, many of them have lived on some form of dole for the majority of their lives, and (like anybody would be) they don't feel terrifically self-confident or self-sufficient as a result. These are people who are so disgusted with the human race and its perceived vagaries, cruelties, inequities, and crimes against the planet, that they'd rather not even be human. (Don't even ask what I'm doing floating around such a group.)
So it's not as though I can really reasonably expect to find a whole lot of political balance there. And upon pulling up the chatty newsgroups, which I'd last read in mid-February, it was with a twinge that I realized I'd soon be scrolling my way through an inevitable morass of truly, truly dumb anti-war sloganeering.
As, indeed, it turned out to be. We had insightful sentiments from DJ-ish types like "Drop Beats Not Bombs", and speculation was batted about that the Bushies were planning to use nuclear weapons in Iraq, and someone had changed her signature to an FDR quote: "A conservative is a man who, having two perfectly good legs, has never taken a single step forward."
But before that was a startling thread from one person who was on the verge of tears for an entirely different reason: he was a Christian. And he felt totally alienated by the group he loved-- vilified and discriminated against by the very people to whom he'd attached himself largely because he'd thought they were all about tolerance and open-mindedness. He felt betrayed. He felt surrounded by scowling faces who saw no difference between him and Pat Robertson, between him and the KKK, between him and a Satan that the scowls didn't believe existed anyway. And he didn't know where he could turn next.
And I got to thinking. Let's see: since so many people start out as liberals, being idealistic and full of progressive, anti-capitalist, anti-McDonald's, anti-modernist causes to fight for from the safety of their prepaid tuitions, it follows that for anyone to become conservative later in life has to involve a conscious change in attitude, catalyzed by some series of personal events or shifting of interests. Remaining a liberal is the default state, and in the absence of some defining event to change one's attitude, one is likely to find a community of like-minded compatriots with which to experience one's twenties and thirties in the same relative comfort and idealistic certainty as one was used to.
So it follows, it seems to me, that a great many people who grow up proud to call themselves "liberals" have quite possibly never actually met a real, live conservative-- except maybe for their jingoistic fathers whom they remember as the guy who always told them to mow the lawn or stop dating hippies, or their square-jawed buzz-cut gym-and-civics teachers who always growled about commies. It's hard to grow up these days with a positive impression of conservatives-- and it's equally hard to grow up with a real first-hand understanding of what conservative politics are about.
The realities of the business world are opaque to the high-school student, who sees only grimy air and ugly smokestacks next to a white-sand California beach. The rights of the landlord are ignored or seen as irrelevant by the tenant, whose friends and roommates are naturally on the opposite end of an adversarial relationship with what can only be a tall and dark-cloaked figure with a top hat and a greasy, curled moustache who darkens poor welfare recipients' doorways each month to demand exorbitant rent to support his own opulent playboy penthouse. The gun owner, casually visiting the range twice a month to brush up on his target practice, is inscrutable to someone who sees the government as being a more benign entity than his neighbors, or who would equate the killing of an animal for food with killing a human for sport. The moderate religious citizen, no matter how low-key or benign his faith, is automatically folded into an über-class of oppressors by kids opening their minds for the first time-- cataclysmically, like a ship floating through the last trammeled channels of a river delta before suddenly finding itself out at open sea with no boundaries in sight-- to the myriad possibilities of existentialism and atheism and Matrix scenarios; it's so attractive for such a wondering youth to think of the past two thousand years of human experience being a deluded mass fiction that even those who take just a passing part in such a delusion become synonymous with the great perpetrators of intellectual darkness in our species' history. Christianity is old and staid and established, and so it becomes evil. Likewise with so many other traditional hallmarks of conservatism-- gun rights, business-friendliness, acknowledgment of military necessity. Group enough of these memes together, and the college student or young adult can't help but equate "conservative" with a caricature so vile and objectionable that it's inconceivable to look at the underlying realities with clear eyes.
So it's with some disappointment that I still find myself floating through social groups full of people who, if they knew I was no longer comfortable with the "liberal" label myself, would suddenly view me with the same narrow-eyed suspicion as they would if told that I donned a white hood and burned crosses at night. But, naturally, I try to keep my mouth shut, for fear of losing friends. Even the most conscientious and centrist conservative viewpoint can seem callous or cruel to a dyed-in-the-wool liberal; how do you discuss landlords' rights with someone who lives in an unpleasant and overpriced apartment, or discuss the Second Amendment with someone who lives down the street from a kid who was killed at school by a classmate who brought his dad's .38 to campus?
I don't have the answer, obviously. If I did, we'd have the Grand Unified Theory of Politics and the way to universal bidirectional dialogue. But there's that unfortunate one-way tendency of politics to contend with, more's the pity. Lots more people spend their childhood reacting positively to the word "liberal" and with distaste toward "conservative" than the other way around. This leads to a profound imbalance in politics and demographics, one that's likely impossible to resolve.
Of course, there's always the contingency of anecdote: I could describe a conservative as "someone who would pull a gun in order to face down a racist", and surely it would short out a few synapses, particular on one of those ever-present people who seem to be absolutely fetishistic about guns, but who viscerally dread the idea of Americans legally allowed to own them. Just as it would ring hollow with someone quoting FDR or Marx for me to point out that American conservatives are the firmest believers in individual liberty, self-determination, and the innovation and technological and social progress that inevitably follows. Danger! Danger! Does not compute. Conservatives are against progress! Why do you think they call it Congress? Taglines don't lie!
But anecdotes can only go so far; there is, unfortunately, the reality that political schisms and prejudices can't be resolved with a well-placed tactical one-liner. The best I can do is to just hope that as these people grow up and find their place in the world, they'll come to realize why it is that half the American political system consists of people who occupy a school of thought that they reflexively think of as evil. Fifty Senators and 240-something Representatives, to say nothing of the highest elected officers and appointed Cabinet positions-- all evil. Never mind the lifetime of thought and philosophy that leads each such politician to such a platform; never mind how much time each one spends each day thinking about how to advance freedom and personal happiness throughout the country and the world, using the proven tools of capitalistic creation of wealth and individual liberty. These must be meaningless three-card-monte shells, pushed forward to hide an ever-present evil agenda and a black, black, corrupt heart.
I have no problem with people being genuinely in favor of those causes one normally associates with "liberal" thinking. Equality, environmental preservation, assistance to the down-at-heel, spiritual freedom, peace-- these are all fine goals. I believe in every one of them, and firmly. However, I also believe that the paths toward them that are so casually espoused by the Left-- equality enforced and over-enforced by fiat, environmental protection through barriers against business, welfare, abolishment of religion, pacifism-- are superficial and short-term semi-solutions that treat the symptoms rather than the causes. That's why I'm no longer comfortable with the term "liberal". I think there are better paths toward these admirable goals, but they're more subtle, or they involve intermediate steps that may seem counterproductive. To have peace, for instance, you can't just not fight; you have to take positive action toward lasting mutual good-will, which can involve things like the overthrow of tyranny-- in other words, war. To bring happiness to the downtrodden, you need to create wealth in the economy, not just dole out the wealth you already have in the hopes that the recipients will somehow be inspired to achievement (or at least become magically happy); and to create jobs, you've got to make your city a favorable place to run a business, not bleed dry anyone stupid enough to set up shop there. To protect the environment, you've got to let businesses become more efficient and less wasteful as a result of their own internal process development, which is in fact in their own interest.
It's a complex world out there, much more complex than it ever seemed when I was peering out the window of my college dorm. It's full of tradeoffs; but it's also managed to survive this long, and those mysterious and shadowy people over on the right who stand for what I always thought of as evil must actually sort of have a point-- because, after all, it's their "conservative" ideals that have kept this country on the amazingly successful track toward all those "liberal" goals, to which we're closer now than ever before in history.
It pains me to think that I'm what so many people whom I like to think of as friends and kindred spirits would think of as evil. But I'm comforted by the thought that there are as many people there whose ideas can and will change over time as there are people who are forever fixated on the worldview they developed from the comfort of a computer chair, disgusted with being unable to see the Golden Arches across the street because of the smog.
Those images are hard to shake, I know. But it's the starkness of what appears to be their truth that is most insidious about them: there is, indeed, more to the picture, and it can only be revealed with time.
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| Friday, August 29, 2003 |
17:40 - Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue...
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,95902,00.html
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But I thought they hated us! I thought they'd all posed grinning for photo-ops in April with the soldiers handing out M&Ms, and a month later took up AK-47s to drive out the despised invaders!
An Iraqi couple has named their 6-week-old baby boy George Bush (search) to show their appreciation for U.S. efforts to force Saddam Hussein (search) out of power.
"He saved us from Saddam and that's why we named our son after him," the baby's mother, Nadia Jergis Mohammed, told the Associated Press Television News. "It was George Bush who liberated us; without him it wouldn't have happened."
Baby Bush was born July 11 to Mohammed, 34, and her husband Abdul Kader Faris, 41. His full name is George Bush Abdul Kader Faris Abed El-Hussein.
If the couple had had twin boys, the father wanted to name the other baby Tony Blair (search), because he said both the U.S. and Britain liberated Iraq.
I wonder if anyone in Iraq is naming their daughter Janeane Garofalo?
Just wait, though. The real scoop, the meme that will stick, is this:
As the woman did the interview, little George Bush screamed in his crib.
How very cleverly worded. Someone break out the 24-pack of Pulitzers.
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13:28 - ¡Ha! ¡Más!
http://www.imao.us/archives/000958.html#000958
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Frank J. has a list of Fun Facts About Hamas. It's about time someone turned up the satire screws on those turds.
* Hamas is a big part of the "cycle of violence". They blow up innocent men, women, and children, and then Israel is like, "Hey, don't do that." And thus the cycle of violence continues.
And he even thinks Aquaman could kick their asses. That's saying something, for Frank.
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11:41 - <bang> <bang> <bang>
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Do pardon the forehead marks on the table.
So in the ongoing battle against Microsoft's unbelievable lack of proactiveness in fixing that stupid JPEG/RDF/XML/IPTC header bug (wherein MSIE will go into a death spiral if it encounters a JPEG that contains an XMP packet with profile and path information, such as Adobe Photoshop writes), I've hit another snag.
For background:
The long-time Photoshop users said, effectively, "Well, duh, of course there's a difference between Save As and Save For Web". Obvious to you, of course, but based on the people who have been emailing me, saying "Oh, so that's what's wrong with my site!" plenty of folks are actually using the inappropriate save option for web purposes. That's a user behavior problem and I'm not sure what the best solution is for that. Adobe could add warning dialogs until they were blue in the face, but they'd still fall victim to [Frank's First Law of Documentation].
All available information suggests that XMP data is a documented, accepted extension to the jpeg standard. Without any evidence to the contrary, my perception is that Adobe has committed no crime, and the onus is on Microsoft to fix Windows IE's jpeg decoder. Hopefully someone read my bug report. Nobody from MS has contacted me.
In the meantime, what can web developers do to avoid the problem?
Well, first and most obvious, if you are creating static graphics, use Save For Web. And (hopefully you're already doing this) test your site on as many platforms as you can.
For more dynamic sites, such as snapclub.com, which accept jpeg file uploads from arbitrary third-parties, there is at least one solution; ImageMagick's "mogrify" command can be used to remove the metadata from the jpeg like so:
mogrify +profile iptc image.jpg
...Which I've been using for a month or two now. And it's worked great. Or so I'd thought.
See, I was sure I'd checked to make sure that this command didn't recompress the JPEG while it was stripping out the IPTC header. I was sure it left the image quality alone. But several artists have e-mailed me to let me know that no, this is not the case. The mogrify command does in fact recompress the JPEG, at some arbitrary level (probably the default 60). So all the many thousand images that people have been uploading in the past month have all been recompressed to some godawful level. And it's only now that they've got the better of their politeness and notified me of it.
<bang> <bang> <bang>
It hardly bears pointing out that this is Microsoft's problem to fix, and that while this problem is increasingly widespread with the adoption of Photoshop 7 in web design houses, most Windows users don't even notice what happens (namely, that IE abruptly stops being able to open JPEG images, and spins endlessly upon opening pages, until you hard-kill the process or reboot), figure it's "some damn worm or something", and reboot. Certainly nobody's able to trace it back to some "poisoned" image that IE choked on way back during the person's surfing history. And needless to say, there's been a patch made available, but it's so low-key and so little has been made of it (or people are so distrustful of software patches and the Windows Update process) that nobody has apparently installed it.
So I, the web designer, get the blame from those people who do encounter the problem. And Microsoft gets off scot free. Like always.
And I have to write godawful workarounds on the server side to clean up after Microsoft's incompetence. And the tools I have to do that aren't a complete solution, and indeed can be worse than the original problem. So I'm stuck.
I guess I can still mogrify the thumbnails, so at least people won't have their browsers freeze up in the middle of loading a gallery page-- only when they should happen to open one of the offending images. JPEG quality on thumbnails isn't a big issue. And maybe this will be good enough.
God damn I hate those two words.
Thank you again, Microsoft. Hope you're enjoying your Freedom To Innovate™.
By the way... is it just me, or was Microsoft's current slogan written by Yoda? "Hmmm! Do Amazing Things You Can. With Windows XP, Yes!"
UPDATE: Chris Adams has been down this road before, and he has the answer: jpegtran, which is part of libjpeg (a package that ImageMagick has as an installation prerequisite anyway):
jpegtran -copy none -outfile nometa.jpg meta.jpg
And the resulting file has no meta-data and has not been recompressed. Yes!
So all I gotta do is jpegtran all my uploads, then copy the resulting files back over the source files, and all will be well...
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| Thursday, August 28, 2003 |
16:21 - CUHMLHFWS Covert Ops
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,60081,00.html
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Damien Del Russo forwards me this guffaw-inducing little gem from the first days of the SoBig storm:
After removing its predecessor MSBlaster, the new worm, which -- just to add to the confusion -- has been dubbed WORM_MSBLAST.D, Nachi and Welchia by various security and antivirus firms, then politely patches the machine against the vulnerability that MSBlaster exploited.
"My computer hasn't been right since it was infected last week," said Nadine Lovell, a Manhattan textile designer. "This afternoon it's working perfectly again."
A scan of Lovell's system confirmed her machine had indeed been infected with the new Blaster variant.
"Thank you, worm!" said Lovell.
Innovative, and amusing-- but somehow it doesn't comfort me that this, the computing equivalent of an entrepreneur innovating his way toward the American Dream, is a lot messier and uglier than Apple's solution, which is to trickle software updates to your machine in the background (if you request it to) and prompt you whenever there's an update ready to be applied. Clean. Centralized. Secure. Friendly.
Makes me feel like such a statist.
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13:23 - Self-parody
http://www.al-shia.com/html/eng/books/miscelleneous/islamic-articles/14089803.html
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This kind of thing really shouldn't be this funny. I wish it weren't. But you know, sometimes the only way to keep from crying is to laugh, right?
Music creates vibration in the body and this is conveyed to all the parts of the body through the nervous system. As a result of it, indigestion occurs. Music affects the heart in such a way that the heartbeats becomes irregular. The blood pressure goes awry. All such ailments make a person permanently ill. Consequently, even the modern medical science, in spite of its astonishing progress, fails in such a situation. Sometimes, the music is so intense that the listener loses his sanity. He becomes dumb and various kinds of mental diseases occur. In places, where music is more prevalent, we find that there are more neurotic illnesses. It is for this reason that most of the mental hospitals are to be found in Europe and America.
Dr. Adlen writes against music, "Even though it seems pleasant, the effect of music is profound upon the nervous system. Specially, when the temperature is high, the ill-effect of music is more. This is the reason that ill-effects of music are more in the hot areas of Iran and Saudi Arabia. The American people are so disgusted with the bane of music that they have united to demand from the senate a permanent ban on music. It is a pity that the whole world perceives the evils of music yet is adopting it as entertainment."
The Islamic world will be reformed when they have their own equivalent of the Onion. One that they do intend as parody.
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11:49 - Now that's a testimonial
http://www.smoking-monkey.com/Jesus.htm
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Sure does explain a lot of the world, don't it?
(Thanks to Capt. J.M. Heinrichs.)
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| Wednesday, August 27, 2003 |
00:56 - Thanks! Uh... you too! Wait...
http://gandalf.ics.uci.edu/blog/2003/08/three_weeks_in_france_ten_years_later.html
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Kris mentioned this fellow's blog-- a Frenchman who had been naturalized as an American citizen, and ten years later went back home for a visit. He described the experience, as well as the return trip:
At last, in a clean, air-conditioned, body odor- free room, the US custom agent looked at my American passport. He then raised his head, and after he verified I didn’t bring any French cheese, said with a warm smile something I never heard as a French citizen re-entering France: “ Welcome home! ”.
Those were the words that came from the suddenly-smiling mouth of the dumpy little blonde woman who stamped my passport yesterday too. I hadn't known what to expect; last year I'd been barked at by a crew-cut column of a man thus:
"WHAT'S YOUR COUNTRY OF CITIZENSHIP?"
"Uh, USA."
"WHERE DO YOU LIVE?!"
"San Jose."
"WHAT DO YOU DO THERE?!?"
"I'm a software engineer."
"WHAT WERE YOU DOING IN CANADA?!!!"
"I was visiting some friends. Something I do every year about this time, you know, sort of a trad--"
"DID YOU SEE THE BALLET?!!?!"
"Uh... no. What?
"I SAID, DID YOU SEE THE BALLET?!?!?!111`1`"
"Uh, bleerg? Glassnorpt. Ah-hoogy hoogy bomb! Allahu akbar! Um, I mean, go Raiders!"
So I had no idea what the customs experience would be this time. The card I filled out said that "controlled substances, obscene materials, and firearms" usually weren't allowed into the US, and I was worried that someone might open my bag and be knocked flat by the smell of a week's worth of wilderness laundry and clap me in irons. (There wasn't anything more incriminating in there. Honest. Certainly nothing from Church Street.) I wasn't sure whether it was more suspicious to put down some innocuous number like "$20" for the amount of goods that I'd purchased while in Canada, and then to itemize it as directed on the back as "camera batteries" or something, and if so if they would demand to see me open my camera and verify that it took $20 batteries-- or to enter "$0" and incur that look of "Okay, nobody doesn't buy anything while on vacation. And we're certainly not buying your story, Ahmed." In the end I found myself scribbling out the "$20", itemizing "camera batteries" and "toothpaste", and changing the value to "$0", then emending it to "$10". In other words, making it as incriminating-looking as I possibly could. I figured that way it would look like I was either a) an amazingly disorganized tourist or b) an amazingly disorganized terrorist, and in either case they might let me through on pity alone.
So imagine my surprise and relief when the little woman's stony face and pursed lips tilted up toward me and bulged into a sunny smile: "Welcome home." (Stamp, stamp, stamp.)
I know they make them say that. I know it's part of the ritual, as rehearsed as any telemarketer's script.
But still.
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11:35 - Cheerful little campfire songs
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I nearly forgot.
While I was in the woods of Ontario, I found an interesting little sheaf of paper in one of the cabins at the camp.
"Camp Songs!" it said at the top. Ah! For strumming with the kiddies around the fire, while making s'mores. For the kids who were in these cabins the previous week. How sweet.
When the night
Has come
And the land
Is dark
And Islam
Is the only
Light I see....
Uhhh.... waiiit a minute.
I'd like to build the world a mosque
And furnish it with faith
Bring Africans and Chinamen
And every human race
Oh... kay.
It went on. For like ten pages. Pop songs, hymns, campfire melodies-- all re-lyricized and filked into Islamic themes.
And not peaceful ones, either. There was one long song that explained in bewildering terms that the US, Canada, and Turkey had all ganged up on Pakistan in order to put Afghanistan through a trial of hell. There were other songs glorifying the day to come when Ottawa would rule a Canada subject to Shari'a law, and the Kuffar States of America too. To say nothing of the Arabic songs that I couldn't translate.
I'd been reading on LGF and elsewhere that these chilling summer camps were being set up all over the US, Canada, and other Western nations. But let me tell you, it's quite another thing to actually come across direct physical evidence of it sitting on top of a bunk bed in a forest bungalow.
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10:15 - Not funny
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| Tuesday, August 26, 2003 |
00:45 - Oh my, a flaming paper bag on my doorstep
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Well, I'm back. And joy of joys, I see there's a little present that's been left for me in my inbox.
Well, no-- perhaps little is the misnomer of the year.
It's this new "SoBig" virus that I heard whispers of while up in Toronto, see. The worst Outlook virus ever, so I'm told. Klez-like in its behavior (in that it combs through your cached Web history and e-mail boxes as well as your address book for names and addresses, which it uses to forge both the recipient and the sender, the upshot of which being that anybody who has a popular website with their e-mail address on it will get bombarded with a copy of the worm for every infected person who's ever been to their site, as well as angry messages directly sent from people who think I've been sending them these things), but not in its impact (where Klez had internal brakes to prevent it from propagating exponentially, SoBig does not-- it can send multiple copies of itself simultaneously, for example). The worm's payload is 103K when encoded. It exploits a vulnerability in Outlook that's been patched for months. A patch that nobody on Earth has apparently applied.
Care to guess how many copies of this charming little beastie were to be found in my inbox upon my landing just before midnight tonight? All starting sometime during the evening of August 18, one day after I left on my vacation which I knew in the back of my brain that I'd regret having taken? Go on. Guess how many.
No. Higher.
Higher.
I'm not kidding. More digits.
Give up?
21,000.
Twenty-one thousand. For a combined mailbox size of 1.14 gigabytes.
Boy oh boy, am I going to have fun getting this one under control. Ten new copies every time I check for new messages. Oh, sure, I'll filter it out on the server side (somehow). But first things first. I've got to try to download all this crap, then sort it and delete the garbage. Then I'll have to tackle the /var/mail directory on the server and see just how bursting it is. That's all I need-- the server itself to burst its seams over this.
Thank you, Microsoft. Thank you so fucking much. This is just what I wanted to spend my first night back home doing.
You know, I'm going to have to regress a little bit here. For the longest time my feelings toward Microsoft were downright murderous. Then, for the past couple of years, they were mostly just sort of tiredly amused. You know, the old whaddyagonnado? thing. But that's not going to survive this little episode. I can't hold myself back. There's going to have to be some payback, and somehow I don't think I'm the only one who will have been hit in a similar manner or driven to such a pass.
I mean, it's really become self-parody in its purest form, hasn't it? Microsoft announces with great fanfare that it is reorganizing its software development strategies so as to put security above all other concerns. And what follows in the subsequent twelve months but a litany of unprecedented viruses, worms, compromise vulnerabilities, and other hideous failures that would be an irreparable embarrassment to any other company-- that would make such a company into a laughingstock that would thrust the Enron scandal firmly into the sweatband of a cocked hat, in a train-wreck of a performance of a piece of software that I can't turn my back on for ten lousy days without it abruptly mutating and exploding and sending radioactive tentacles everywhere, like some homeless guy from an alley in Toronto who shrieks at the top of his lungs continuously and with no apparent flagging of energy, and who decides inexplicably to follow you four blocks to the subway station, still emitting howls of wordless fury after your retreating back, yet somehow able to buy subway tokens and operate the turnstiles because you hear him screeching furiously in your direction as soon as the subway door opens for each the next five stops up the Downsview-University-Spadina line?
I've had it. I've had it up to here with Microsoft's incompetence, their lip-service to making things better, and their insufferably arrogant attitude towards the consumer. Enough is enough. Too much is riding on the Internet now for companies who pit their fortunes on it not to notice this massive liability they have in trusting the construction of the scaffolding on which they climb to Microsoft. There will have to be a reckoning, because nobody can ignore the irony of a solemn vow of commitment to security and reliability being followed by a year of escalating security breaches of never-before-seen proportions.
Now, don't nobody be giving me no platitudes about how if it weren't Outlook out there serving people's e-mail needs, it would be some other program-- Eudora or Netscape (pbuh) or Pegasus Mail or whatever-- which would invariably be equally as bad as Microsoft's piece of compiled compost, and even worse for business because what purchasing manager would trust his company's fortunes to a firm he can't sue for the sum of his company's market cap? Please. It's been well documented for many years (right here on this page, I might add) that Microsoft's software is garbaceous in ways that other companies with far fewer resources just can't even approach no matter how hard they try. It's like trying to dance against the beat: most companies can't force themselves to produce crap that smells as bad as Microsoft's. It's not possible. Most companies employ human beings with standards of personal pride in what they write. How can such beings compete with the million monkeys hammering away in the lava caves under Mt. Rainier?
Maybe SoBig will fade away to a smirk and a roll of the eyes from the Buddy-Holly-looking guy on the evening news at eight minutes to the hour, just like every other past snafu that whirls in a maelstrom through the Internet every few months with Microsft serene and calm and unruffled at the center. Maybe nothing will come of this, just like always. We'll all just sigh, roll up our sleeves, and pick up the old shit-shovels like we do every time, dutifully spooning Microsoft's clockwork turds into baggies and stirring them into our ice cream to eat with a smile. I can't freaking wait.
I'm thinking maybe we need to start an action group: CUHMLHFWS, or Citizens United to Help Microsoft Learn How to Fucking Write Software. It would be a great philanthropic undertaking, surely one from which the world would benefit.
If anybody needs me, I'll bee knee-deep in twenty-one thousand gallons of solid waste.
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| Sunday, August 17, 2003 |
05:26 - WE INVENETED TEH INTERWEB!!!11!1`
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In the San Jose Airport:
"Whenever you see these symbols, connect using a laptop powered by Intel® Centrino™ Technology™!"
 
No, thanks, I think I'll continue connecting with AirPort, the way I've been doing it since three years before Intel came up with "Centrino".
God, what a great way to start off this vacation. Right under thirty-foot banners advertising the manufacturing house that makes the Xbox, too.
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| Friday, August 15, 2003 |
19:10 - Are there bits in de wall?
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I just got word that our T1 has been installed.
A good thing, too, because I was about to cease my Good Cop routine and loose the full Bad Cop fury of Lance on the ISP for breach of contract. Recall, after all, that this line was supposed to have been installed prior to July 1.
But today, apparently, there were hours upon hours of people calling on cellphones from the job site (e.g. my house) and from cubicle to cubicle as they squeezed tiny incremental pieces of information from XO, each one accompanied by a whoop of success. When I called for the status report today at about 3:00, it was a very haggard-sounding voice that answered the phone.
And after hearing that, and his nigh-tearful admission that it's out of his hands and wholly in XO's court and there's nothing more he could do until they got the line switched back via XO, and after having read Lileks' spookily well-timed admonishment to ply my telephone handset with honey rather than with vinegar, it was all I could do to muster the gruffness to threaten to nullify the contract if a more favorable deal could not be negotiated, especially in the face of what turns out to be considerably better deals from other T1-grade ISPs in the area.
But he said, "I read you loud and clear," and I felt like an awful heel and a virtuous consumer at the same time. And lo, the bits did begin to flow these thirty minutes now.
There'll be some router machinations later tonight-- because of an unrelated matter, they've got us on a temporary alternate subnet until they reboot their main switch panel and the router we're on for some reason-- but evidently we're on a full T1, not the half-T1 that we'd been budgeting for. It's only $220 extra per month. And hey, what's that between the two parties who are merely the mutual victims in all this, namely the customer and the ISP?
Thank you very much, Pac Bell/SBC. You've made it a hell of a ride. And now we have brand-new sidewalk panels in front of our house, which we wouldn't otherwise have had. Yep-hh.... mighty fine sidewalk panels they are indeed.
And it also means I can blog from home again. So I'll be heading there shortly.
Except that I'm going to be on vacation starting early Sunday morning. So I only get to enjoy the bandwidth for the duration of tomorrow, until I head into the barren and blacked-out Northlands, where there may or may not be a functioning airport terminal to receive me and my tired bones.
Followed by what's sure to be, among other things, a week of baldfaced criticism of the Nazi nation in which I live, the bristle-skulled Epsilon-minus bodybuilder about to seize power in my state of residence, and the dung-and-poison-tipped-nookular-missile-throwing simian occupying the Oval Office.
Just the kind of vacation I need. Yay!
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10:19 - Welcome to 2003
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20030814
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Is it just me, or is this not the most tired, well-worn old Vietnam-era canard that's ever been floated in political wartime humor?
This and the whole recent Doonesbury story thread, in which the troops in Iraq are in fact fighting street to street against hardened militia forces holed up in civilian homes, supported by an irate populace intent on nothing so much as driving out the hated invaders.
I know there are bloggers who are actually in The 'Raq right now, who know better, and could e-mail Mr. Trudeau in the hopes of enlightening him, in case there's a chance of his realizing what year this actually is. The reality that I've been hearing from almost all sources is entirely at odds with this desperate fantasy that Trudeau seems intent upon carrying out to its bitter end: why, after 'Nam, and after The Mog, how could this possibly be any different?
I guess there's the possibility that this is tongue-in-cheek, but considering the kinds of things this strip has been focusing on lately, I doubt it.
"Pinned down". For God's sake.
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| Thursday, August 14, 2003 |
17:43 - Ah, the mysteries of life
http://members.optusnet.com.au/white_gold/
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A friend pointed me at this a little while ago, and I've been reading through the entries day by day in astonishment, sucking up a few pages each night through our meager shared modem line multiplexed out into 54Mbps AirPort Extreme (there's a parody of modern technology if there ever was one). My eyes get wider and wider the more I read.
"Enter the Cow-Orker", the site is called. It's the three-year-old-and-counting journal of an unnamed office worker somewhere in Australia, drearily holding his own at some kind of software clearing-house firm, endlessly scourged by an absolutely insufferable excuse for a fellow human being in the next cubicle. The Cow-Orker. Scott Adams' coinage. And Adams himself has evidently given the site his vote of hearty approval.
My only question is, My God-- how in the name of all that's sour can this woman still have a job?
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17:36 - Ve haf vays uff making you pronounce correctly
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Back in March, I commented on the new Nestlé ad campaign for their caramel-filled Twix (or whatever it is). They had an ad in which two city dwellers sit on some steps and argue about whether it's pronounced caramel or carmel.
I wouldn't have been annoyed by this, except that then the ad scene gave way to the close-ups of the candy bar itself and the youthful announcer talking about the rich, creamy carmel inside. Apparently that famous resort town is not only rich, which we all knew, but creamy as well. And Nestlé's official position is thereby revealed: after giving equal cred to both pronunciations in the presentation of the scene, with the two guys arguing, they themselves came down on the side of the two-syllable edition. Much to my dismay.
So the ad runs its due course and vanishes from screens. Until just a few days ago, when it came back. The city-steps argument is the same, the visuals are the same, everything appear to be unchanged, including the announcer's voice-- except that now the announcer clearly says caramel instead of carmel. Almost unnecessarily sharply and distinctly, too. Rich, creamy care-a-mel.
So what could this sordid tale be? Was the original ad yanked for quality-control reasons, the unapproved pronunciation making it past the ad quality testers? Did they force the twentysomething voice actor back into the sound studio, stick a gun in his back, and hold up big placards behind the plate glass directing him to pronounce it the three-syllable way if he ever wants to see his Xbox again? Are they doing some kind of "Lime Skittles or Sour Apple Skittles-- You Decide!" kind of promotion, whereby through grass-roots consumer appeal Nestlé plans to set in stone forevermore the accepted pronunciation of sticky sugary goo? Will there be two different Twix packages sitting side by side in every candy aisle-- the fast-selling caramel version and the ever-vandalized carmel version, or vice versa, depending on region?
Bring 'em on. I can't wait to see them duke it out.
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| Wednesday, August 13, 2003 |
10:32 - Marketing Genius
http://www.tacobell.com/gas/
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You know what I think is just completely awesome?
This promotion at Taco Bell. The one where you can win free gasoline for a year.
So let me get this straight. If you eat at Taco Bell... you might get gas?
Can this be knowingly tongue-in-cheek? Do I dare hope?
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| Tuesday, August 12, 2003 |
16:59 - Crimes of omission
http://traffic2.bayinsider.com/news/2400932/detail.html
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The big flap on the KCBS news every ten minutes is that a repeat child molester, Brian DeVries, has been ruled by a judge to be no longer a threat to the community, and ordered transferred from the mental hospital where he's been kept for the last several years... into a trailer on the grounds of the Soledad prison.
Residents of Soledad are outraged, KCBS reports over and over. Money soccer-mom soundbite: "I'm very disappointed that the judge reached this decision, and didn't try to take any steps to protect the children of our community."
Other pithy quotes:
"This isn't the appropriate location for him," said Noelia Chapa, city manager for the Monterey County town of 13,000 along Highway 101. "He needs to go back to Santa Clara County. We don't want to be the dumping ground here."
"We don't want this guy in our town. This guy is sick," Gutierrez, 43, said. "He should go to a place in the desert where there's no kids around."
To hear the news report, well, hell, absolutely. Why would the judge act so irresponsibly? Why would anyone release this guy from the psych ward?
Why, it's because of one small, insignificant fact that KCBS seems to find it entirely unimportant to report:
To help demonstrate his intent to reform, DeVries was castrated in August 2001 -- a surgery DeVries said took away his ability to become sexually aroused.
Something tells me that most of the wide-eyed interviewees on the street that KCBS and other news agencies keep talking to aren't being made aware of this meaningless little tidbit.
It is as it has always been: just say the magic words To Protect The Children, and the throng will nod along to the beat.
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| Monday, August 11, 2003 |
13:57 - Corrupting vulnerable young hearts
http://www.kbtoys.com/genProduct.html/PID/2431939/ctid/17/place/aguc?_ts=y&ls=collec
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"No, Junior! I'm not buying you any more of these awful violent toys. All they do is teach you a lot of bad values! Like treating the President as some kind of respectable figure that kids should look up to, instead of a mass-murdering war criminal who's just like Hitler except without the brains!"
Via CapLion. Y'know, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during the product pitch meeting for this item...
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13:16 - Weekend Update with Kevin Nealon
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No photos this time; sorry.
Which I guess is good, because the front yard actually looks a little bit less kempt than it was last week-- on account of the fact that the edges of the gravel and the weed cloth it's on have all been rolled back so the SBC guys could dig six feet down and lay conduit.
Last Wednesday and Thursday, see, they went down under our gravel patch and prepared to burrow under our driveway. They unveiled their "missile", a five-foot-long metal cylinder that you could about wrap two hands around, fingertips touching. The stick it in the hole, horizontally, hook up a high-pressure air hose to the nether end, and it starts pounding its way through the ground. BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM! Or at least that's the theory.
Because when they started the missile under our driveway, it got about three feet in and then... stopped. They couldn't get it moving again. They dragged it out, and found that it had shattered into several bedraggled pieces.
So they came out the next day, with a bigger missile, one that presumably cost them even more digits. They dug down on the other side of the driveway, about where we'd dug our trench a couple of weeks ago; they sent the missile in going the opposite direction. It bammed away for an hour or so, then... stopped. They dragged it out; it was split from one end to the other like a hot dog you left in the microwave too long.
I dare not even contemplate how much money this job has cost SBC, in time, labor, and equipment. At least we don't have to pay for any of it-- oh wait, I guess we do. Now we know where all those mysterious fees and rate hikes come from. I guess everyone has me to thank. Ah-heh-heh. Ahem.
So anyway, they gave up and pulled up the driveway, and jammed the conduit in. That was late last week. Now I must call and find out why we're still not online.
Oh, and we planted those trees and shrubs in the front yard. The crape myrtle is now ensconced at the corner of the sidewalk and neighbor's driveway (we should have thought to drop it in while the contractors had their trench dug), and the rear line of the gravel area is lined with new flowering plants that we picked up. Not the azaleas-- thanks to a tut-tutting neighbor and her venerable Sunset Garden Book, we now know that azaleas find direct sunlight to be most distressing. So we moved those to the backyard along with some various birches for a corner grove, and in their place picked up a line of splendiferrus verilligata or something. With the help of my parents and grandma, who all came down to indulge in a bit of overdue-but-yet-premature housewarming, and with the sacrifice of my dad's back, the front yard is now planted. We now just have to wait for everything to take root, and then we can move the gravel back into place and think about irrigation.
So at any rate... I'd better get calling the network people. Though I'm finding it interestingly convenient that I don't have a real connection while I write; otherwise I doubt I'd be making any progress at all.
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| Friday, August 8, 2003 |
12:16 - Fey Unabomber
http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/003686.php
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Great Fisking over at Tim Blair's joint of that bizarre Mark Morford rant.
Because there is more meaning and content and depth and significance in a lover's moan and in a drop of wine and in a dog's wag than in anything you can conjure in your homophobic faux-cowboy Lynne Cheney-thick dream, honey. Get over yourself. We are on to you. We know you are made of nothing but spin and frantic gesticulations and scowls. Poke a finger into you and out pours only sawdust and sighs.
Poke a finger in Morford (wear gloves) and out pours this stuff. Lucky we’ve got some sawdust.
Here is my porn collection. Here are my divine sex toys and my lubricants and my leather strappy things and my collection of happy open-minded perversions and my active account at Blowfish.com and my tattoos and piercings and love of massage oil and vibrators and things that go ooooh in the night. Come on over, Mr. Ashcroft, I have something to show you.
If I was reading this in 1973, and if I was an elderly woman, I might be mildly startled by that paragraph.
Hear, hear. You know, I hope Bush read Morford's column, because I'm sure he would have laughed his ass off.
I get enough of people simpering about how they're in favor of happiness (emphasis on the last two syllables) and The Man is for Christianity and Dour Evil in my non-blog life, thank you. How come some people just never, ever grow up?
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| Thursday, August 7, 2003 |
11:43 - Bleataaaahhhje
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/03/0803/080703.html
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Today's Bleat is one of the longer and more uproarious ones I've seen in a while. Nice and chewy. Plus he found that Terminator font.
I guess this is what happens when he's prevented from Bleating for a few days. There's always a silver lining!
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| Wednesday, August 6, 2003 |
23:58 - I hate...
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terrorism-Plea.html
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....The way this makes me feel.
Mike Silverman notes this development: brutally, wrongfully detained American Citizen (of Palestinian descent) Mike Hawash, who for months has been supported by a network of well-wishing friends convinced of his innocence, pleaded guilty today of trying to join the Taliban after 9/11 to fight against the US.
This is not the first time this has happened, either, and I hate when this kind of thing happens. I hate it because it leads me ever closer to a conclusion that I can't abide, a conclusion that I had thought I'd never find myself reaching regarding how we need to be acting toward a certain group of identifiable people.
It's a terrible, hateful feeling, one that I had thought unworthy of anyone more moral than a Nazi. But the more times things like this happen, the closer I get to thinking that our only prudent choice of action is to refuse to rule out that any Arab or Muslim-- regardless of his circumstances-- could be a "sleeper".
Our government can't do that. We as a people can't do that. We're supposed to be better than that. Freedom above security, after all. Internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII was a deplorable act, especially in the safety of retrospect. We can never allow ourselves to be tempted to let that happen again.
Even if it's warranted.
Our freedom, and our dedication to it, is our weakness. It must take precedence over security, because in this case the two are at odds. I hate the reality that represents; I hate the way it makes me feel about my own priorities. I hate having to decide between those two mutually exclusive-- but vital-- ideals.
And so we need help. We can't do this on our own.
The US Government needs the help of the Muslim community. Pledged, promised, and delivered. We need American Muslims' help in rooting out the terrorists, in reporting them and bringing them to justice instead of turning a blind eye. Our government can't be the one to keep tabs on those who are at high risk for being or harboring terrorists; neither can non-Muslim Americans, for either would result in massive outcry against civil liberties, and rightly so. Not only would it be shades of Japanese internment and renewed racist suspicion, it would recall the Big-Brotherism of totalitarian regimes the world over that encouraged neighbors to spy on neighbors, or the McCarthyists here at home who exhorted kids to rat out their Red parents. We can't do that, even if we agree with the ostensible goals of such methods, for the methods themselves are slimy. No... the only people we can rely on to help us eliminate the threat is the Arab-American and Muslim communities themselves. It's the only way we can find the terrorists and bring them to justice, without being decried by the Left for unfair profiling or discrimination. It's up to them to help us, because as Americans too, their interests are ours. We must have their friendship, their cooperation, their understanding of our country's needs and ideals and their willingness to act in accordance with them.
I don't know what kind of cooperation we can expect, but it's my hope-- however uncertain-- that the grass roots will speak up and give us the help we badly need.
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16:52 - 1000 words
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/8/6/105528.shtml
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That there be a post-Gulf-War MiG-25 Foxbat, that there be.
Just look at all that desert.
All those dunes.
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13:35 - Well, that's a relief
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Apparently, Diane Feinstein has decided not to run in the California recall election. This is doubly satisfying in that a) she would have been more popular than Davis, and thus garnered more Democratic votes; and b) now that Davis is running alone, there's virtually no chance that he'll win.
Not that I'm particularly enthused by any of the challengers. It's not exactly shaping up to be a very dignified affair, what with the Dems suing left and right over petty operational details, and with people like Gallagher and Larry Flynt taking up positions on the stump. I'm just as glad Ah-nuld isn't running after all, because in this motley crew nobody would have given him the time of day. "But I aaahm sehrious!" "Yeah, right."
But at least Feinstein won't be running things, for which I am profoundly glad. If Davis has one distinguishing characteristic, it's that he's gotten absolutely nothing done; he always claims to be too busy to appear on interviews, but somehow I doubt he's drowning in paperwork that only the Governor is capable of handling. (Or maybe he is, which would be damning.) But Feinstein wouldn't share that trait.
Aside from being criminally careless with guns in public demonstrations of why she's so firmly against them, she's all in favor of her own right to arm herself. Just not anybody else. When she was mayor of San Francisco, she sponsored a gun buyback program, whereby citizens could voluntarily turn in their weapons for cash. Posing for the cameras, she smugly handed over her own gun. But then a reporter had the audacity to ask her that didn't she have two guns registered to her name? What about the other one?
She had the reporter followed and beaten.
Afterwards, she sponsored a state measure to deny the use of "assault rifles" to anybody but law enforcement bodies and their legal deputies. Guess what she did next? She deputized herself.
I'm not able to find much online about these events, but then Feinstein backs things like making it a felony to discuss drugs on the Internet, so who knows to what lengths she's gone.
It's bad enough that she's in the Senate, but at least there she's got 99 other individuals to help drown her out. In the California Governor's Mansion she'd have the means to do quite a lot more damage.
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11:22 - How times change
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Tim Blair links to this interesting Nicholas Kristof piece that paints the 1945 atomic bombs as a great boon to the Japanese-- identified as such by Japanese voices of the time.
Wartime records and memoirs show that the emperor and some of his aides wanted to end the war by summer 1945. But they were vacillating and couldn't prevail over a military that was determined to keep going even if that meant, as a navy official urged at one meeting, "sacrificing 20 million Japanese lives."
The atomic bombings broke this political stalemate and were thus described by Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister at the time, as a "gift from heaven."
Without the atomic bombings, Japan would have continued fighting by inertia. This would have meant more firebombing of Japanese cities and a ground invasion, planned for November 1945, of the main Japanese islands. The fighting over the small, sparsely populated islands of Okinawa had killed 14,000 Americans and 200,000 Japanese, and in the main islands the toll would have run into the millions.
"The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war," Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief cabinet secretary in 1945, said later.
Some argue that the U.S. could have demonstrated the bomb on an uninhabited island, or could have encouraged surrender by promising that Japan could keep its emperor. Yes, perhaps, and we should have tried. We could also have waited longer before dropping the second bomb, on Nagasaki.
But, sadly, the record suggests that restraint would not have worked. The Japanese military ferociously resisted surrender even after two atomic bombings on major cities, even after Soviet entry into the war, even when it expected another atomic bomb — on Tokyo.
One of the great tales of World War II concerns an American fighter pilot named Marcus McDilda who was shot down on Aug. 8 and brutally interrogated about the atomic bombs. He knew nothing, but under torture he "confessed" that the U.S. had 100 more nuclear weapons and planned to destroy Tokyo "in the next few days." The war minister informed the cabinet of this grim news — but still adamantly opposed surrender. In the aftermath of the atomic bombing, the emperor and peace faction finally insisted on surrender and were able to prevail.
One of Tim's commenters, Scott H., quotes a Farker named Thale who summarizes the malleable historical opinions thus:
"While American scholarship has undercut the U.S. moral position, Japanese historical research has bolstered it."
And goes on:
American scholars: The use of atomic bombs by the U.S. on Japan was a wholly unnecessary thing.
Japanese scholars: No, we wouldnt have surrendered otherwise.
American scholars: Yes you would have. All we had to do was drop Fat Man on a small Pacific island to show you we had it.
Japanese scholars: No, really the military wasnt going to stop fighting.
American scholars: Well if wed allowed surrender with the provision that Japan could keep the Emperor.
Japanese scholars: Look even after you guys dropped both bombs the military didnt want to surrender. It took us beating a downed pilot into saying you had hundreds more Atomic bombs and Tokyo was next for them to even start to budge.
American scholars: Well we were still wrong.
And another commenter, Tokyo Taro, notes:
Scholarship is one thing but politics another. No positive adjective should ever be attached to the use of the bomb. The question is why or why not. Good strategy or bad? The revisionists will always have the advantage of the fact that no one in their right mind would allow themselves to praise an atomic bombing. It automatically results in disqualification from the debate. YOu think WHAT?! On the other hand, the revisionists have the disadvantage of the fact that the bombings ended a war in which the suffering of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just a drop in the bucket and the fact that things have turned out pretty well for both countries since then.
That disadvantage, however, has to be carefully explained to them, while their advantage is right out in the open. Nobody has to educate anybody about how an A-bomb is bad for children and other living things, but if you want someone to understand the concept of the bomb ending much greater bloodshed and preventing more huge numbers of casualties, you have to sit him down in one of those tiny little chair-desk arrangements and whack him with a ruler.
If Iraq has taught us nothing else, it's that. It's all about 3000 inadvertent civilian casualties-- surely we all agree that civilian casualties are bad-- but let none mention the 3000 intentional murders per month that Saddam has had to stop committing because of those civilians' sacrifice. And how do we know history happened in the first place? How do we know there was ever a World Trade Center? Maybe it was all just an illusion-- and therefore what right do we have to go mucking around in the Middle East?
It's not so much "revisionism" as deliberately ignoring crucial cause and effect. Because, hey, that always works.
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| Monday, August 4, 2003 |
19:10 - Hate is okay...
http://bushflash.com/ihr.html
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... if the targets are Republicans.
Waaaait a minute. Eric Blumrich? Is this what that creep's doing these days?
Somehow it doesn't surprise me, I guess.
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18:56 - This defies parody
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20030804
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10:20 - What a difference crown molding makes
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I'm almost done with the upstairs bathroom! Whee!
 
Okay, granted, it doesn't look like much in these pictures. But trust me-- if you're actually in the bathroom, it looks awesome.
(<BRENDON SMALL>I know what I need: a fisheye lens!</BRENDON>)
The crown molding is what really did it. It's like, you paint the walls some bright primary color, and it looks like a preschool or-- in the case of the other bathroom that we painted deep currant red-- an abbatoir. (Especially if the upper edge is all ragged.) But add some crown molding, and it's like you just raised the room three social-class notches. And so much the better when you finish taping off the caulk line and repainting the edge, and adding the bright gloss white finish to the molding. Which takes a long bloody time. (I really despise standard bristle brushes-- but it's the only way.) And that blue masking tape-- that stuff is expensive! Five bucks a roll? $30 for an economy pack? Ye gods. I hate having to reuse that stuff, but I'm going to have to once we do the molding in my bedroom, with its 16-foot walls.
So, yeah-- then there's the front yard. Here are the pictures I promised:
  
(Those of you who live in places where real estate is not so precious that you have to shoo the gold panners out of your driveway every morning, feel free to mock the size of the frontage.)
Once everything's planted, it'll look niiice. Azaleas along the back of the gravel area, another line of them along the house, two cypresses framing the picture window, and mock riverbed (made out of largish flat rocks) leading from the gravel up to the wall, just left of the window. And maybe one of those little Japanese wood bridges over it.
And then lighting.
Yes, this is fun. Especially after the fact.
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| Saturday, August 2, 2003 |
00:59 - Thy pain, it is felt
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2003/20030801l.gif
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Courtesy of Marcus.
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00:41 - Taking shape
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Today we made some real progress on the front yard.
The limestone boulders and the gravel have already been put down; today, the job was to put in some living matter. Because with just the rocks and gravel (and before that, the rocks and the expanse of weed cloth), it looked like we'd just been raking and managed to dig up some monstrous submerged lawnmower-crackers.
Now there's a line of azalea bushes around the rear edge of the gravel area, and a crepe myrtle tree (trained up on a stake, so instead of being a big shrub with branches sticking up from the ground, the branches start about six feet up, ending in big clusters of white flowers). And a park bench. The plants aren't planted yet, but the effect is an astonishing improvement: we can now tell what it's supposed to look like. Instead of a freakish half-complete afterthought of a landscaping job, like the pepperoni dream of a concrete-obsessed 60s architect, like the petrified bowel movement of a badly impacted dragon, it now resembles nothing so much as a park.
Pictures tomorrow.
Because now I've actually also started to make progress on networking. The AirPort Base Station is mounted on the wall in the downstairs bathroom (if anyone asks, we'll tell them it's an air freshener-- makes it smell like apples), and it's hooked up to cables trained through a pipe embedded in the wall so there's no visible sign of supporting architecture. Except that just before installation, Capri managed to get hold of the clear plastic mounting frame and gnaw it from its original totally unrecognizable shape into a different totally unrecognizable shape. It still fits, but it's a lot uglier now if you take the base station down off the wall.
So now the downstairs iMac and my iBook can freely roam, and they're sharing the copious bandwidth of a 56K modem mostly occupied by game traffic. Woop-de-frickin-hey. But it means I can make some real headway on the book; the first couple of meaty chapters are done, and now it's into the cruising phase. Or so goes the theory.
Anyway, that means I should be able to add some pictures to this post as soon as my camera recharges; actually I guess there's no technical reason I have to have the net up before I can post pictures, and it's more just a psychological thing: if the net isn't available, I feel as though computing is hardly worth the bother. I just wait till work and do it there.
At least it'll be worth it. Today's efforts could indeed have been less strenuous; we got the tree and the azaleas at a wholesale nursery on Southwest Expressway, and in order to get them home we slid them upright into the back of Kris' truck. (The myrtle was in a 24" box.) And then we took off. And not three hundred feet down the road, the myrtle pitched over backwards.
Well, durr, I thought. I shoulda seen that coming.
So after some experimentation with lever positions and stress points and having it lie sideways and drag on the pavement, I decided that the only way to get the thing home would be to prop it back up vertical, lie down in the truck bed among the azaleas, hunker down so as to avoid the roving eyes of cops, and keep a firm hand clenched around the tree. Lance (whom, by the way, I wouldn't describe as a partner, but rather as a good friend) would drive, keeping it under 30 mph if possible, and I would hold the thing up as best I could.
And we made it. Turned out the big problem wasn't so much sharp acceleration (though sharp acceleration wasn't exactly a picnic) as constant velocity; the tree acted as a giant sail, and at any speed above about 20, the tree leaned back against my arm like a slat on an aboveground swimming pool that's about to give way. And the trip was long-- far longer than I would have imagined the span from Bascom/Meridian to the Camden area to ever be. By the time we arrived, the top of the myrtle barely having cleared the bottoms of countless corridors of shade trees and power lines, my body was contorted into a position I hadn't imagined I would ever have found comfortable. I'd had to brace my leg against the liftgate, strut my right arm against the tree, and prop myself up with the left one. After a few minutes of sitting in this position, which to an outside observer would have looked quite a sight-- a pickup truck with its hazards on, picking its way gingerly down Meridian with a bed full of big-leafed bushes and a tall flowery tree sticking up from behind the cab, with a pasty white arm protruding from within the bushes and jammed against its trunk-- I realized that I was okay if I stayed in that position, because my limbs were mostly locked into place and devoid of blood. But if I tried to stand up or reattain any kind of bodily symmetry, I was in for a significant amount of pain as the fluids of my joints flowed back into their accustomed positions. "Just keep going," I kept bawling into the open sliding window of the cab. And we did. The best bet was to just get it over with as quickly as possible. I wouldn't be able to take over a driving shift, no sirree. So it took the better part of an hour, but we made it-- the tree vertical and intact, and with most of its blossoms still attached.
And boy howdy do I have a sunburn now.
So tomorrow we try to make some progress on the kitchen cabinetry, and maybe the crown molding for my bedroom, and/or the pilings for the deck. Technically we should be doing the line of trees for the backyard before we put the deck in, but, well... I think we may want to look into alternate methods of delivery before we go buying any more trees.
Just sayin', is all.
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| Thursday, July 31, 2003 |
18:24 - Progress?
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Just got word that the SBC guys finally sent some trucks out this morning, and were set up most of the day; they had a whole assembly line going. The goal was to locate the junction box and see what they would have to do in order to connect it with the trench we dug through our flowerbed.
They found the box, buried six feet underneath the sidewalk two houses over, 100 feet from where the trench ends.
They're going to have to get the buried-services-locator guys to come out and slop paint around again, but that shouldn't take more than a day; then they get to dig up the sidewalk over the junction box, sink a water-borer down into the pit, and then dig a Chunnel for the hundred-foot run to the endpoint. It must be something to see, this high-pressure water excavation thingy boring its horizontal way underneath huge expanses of pavement. But I assume they've done it before, so it'll happen and it'll be done right. Sometime in the next couple of days, if nothing more goes amiss.
We're assured that we've done our part, though. It's now in the hands of the Phone Company Gods.
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13:08 - Dowd for a day
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/07/Culturalcrosspollination.shtml
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Just look what Den Beste said today:
...Dogs reproduce by fission.
He said it! He did! Right there in black and white! I agree with Philip Shropshire-- who could possibly take this man seriously?!
... Hee. I kid. I couldn't resist; I am weak.
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11:14 - Gives new meaning to "Shaft"
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Last night on KCBS, when the top-of-the-hour news reported on Bush's comments yesterday that he supported codifying laws against same-sex marriages (but, according to the report, expressed tolerance for gays by saying "we're all sinners"-- faint praise indeed), they decided that the best way to follow it up would be to head to the Castro district for some unbiased opinions to broadcast on-air.
"He said that? Yeah, that sounds like something he'd say."
"I propose illegalizing marriage for straight people!"
"Bush? <spit!>"
Okay, well, I made up that last one. But then this morning they went to Minnesota to get sound-bites from grizzled-sounding old men and breathy uncertain young women who repeated witty incisive one-liners about Adam and Steve.
In other words, ho-hum-- violence in the Middle East, sunny day in Florida, sports stars on trial for rape, cell-phone owners in pickup trucks crash into Dixie Chicks tour buses, and gays don't like a religious Republican's stand on homosexuality, while the religious right does. Same ol' same ol'.
Naturally Bush's words don't exactly fill me with warm fuzzies. (Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of opinions from the usual blogosphere suspects.) Naturally I don't agree with what W says on this matter. He couches his argument in religious (and therefore ostensibly moral) terms. But as I said a few days ago, it's entirely possible to disagree with someone else's morals, but for both parties to have morals. I think most of the country understands that, which is why we have TV shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy setting viewership records instead of being widely boycotted.
And I should also note that I don't exactly find it worrisome that Bush has these views. He's a born-again Christian, for Pete's sake-- it sort of goes with the territory. For what it's worth, he has the courage of his convictions, and I respect him greatly for it, even when those convictions don't coincide with my own-- because for the most part, on other matters, they do. I have more regard for what this says about his character overall than what it means for the individual issues to which he applies that character.
(I know, I know-- Hitler had the courage of his convictions too. But I daresay that I would have found the conclusions to which those convictions led me to be repugnant. Whereas Bush's I don't.)
I've had British friends express worry to me over the fact that Bush is "openly religious"-- which, to him, was just as suspect a thing to be as "openly gay" was to the American public in, say, 1990. But he's hardly unique in that. I think it would be a difficult job to find a President in our history who did not at least claim to be a religious man. And Glenn points out that even Clinton was less progressive on this matter than his fans would have liked. He didn't win many friends on Castro & 18th the day he signed the DoMA.
Frankly, I don't much fear how Bush as President happens to feel about gay marriage. He's not King George, regardless of what the guys at the west end of Market Street might say. His word does not instantly become law. Even if he were to introduce a bill on the subject, like for a Constitutional amendment, it would have to be debated in Congress, which represents a much bigger cross-section of American life than the President does-- and imagine the havoc that would cause. It would be an upheaval on the scale of Roe vs. Wade or the ERA. It would be an issue that touches on every single person in the country-- and something that I think would get more people out and voting than ever before in many Americans' lives. Everybody has an opinion on gay people, whether pro or con, and it's the big unanswered civil-rights question of our age. It's potentially as big a matter of public discourse as if Jim Crow laws were still on the books.
As Glenn says, the chances of such an amendment passing are foggy at best; I'd say that enough people in the country are tolerant or ambivalent enough on the issue that they wouldn't be willing to come out and vote in favor of such an exclusionary law. Only the truly reactionary would do that, and there really aren't that many Fred Phelpses in the country. Too many conservative, small-government, live-and-let-live types would have to admit to themselves that what they're doing is granting more special power to the federal government, for the purpose of enforcing a restriction that would have a tangible negative physical and psychological impact on people they know, while even they can't resist giggling over Homer Simpson's bumbling justifications for homophobia. Hypocrisy and sanctimony are a yucky combination, and they don't feel good.
So I don't think this changes my opinions about George Bush. It's pretty much what I'd have expected from him. If there weren't a War on Terror, and if I were otherwise planning to vote for him in 2004, this might be a big enough issue to change my mind. But there is, and it isn't.
Because just as it would have been impossible to pass a pro-segregation law in 1970, whereas ten years before the matter was still up in the air, today's situation is fluid and getting more so. I'd even say it's reached critical mass, where over the course of a very small period of time it goes from being perfectly acceptable to growl about "fags" to the whole issue being the subject of wistful giggly humor and solidarity and pride. I suspect there will be queer-sploitation films in 2005 and beyond. And all the Presidential orders in the world won't change what the country thinks.
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| Tuesday, July 29, 2003 |
12:01 - Notworking
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Just a little status report on our ever-lengthening efforts to get a partial T1 into the house.
(And before anyone asks what the hell we're going to all this trouble for, we need symmetrical bandwidth and the ability to host our own servers. We don't get DSL here-- the CO five hundred feet away was installed in the longlongago for a subdivision that was never actually built, so it's "dark"-- and Comcast cable service isn't symmetric and doesn't allow hosting or fixed IPs. This is our only option.)
In mid-June, I signed the contract with the connectivity provider, who I must note has been exemplary with service since day one, as I would expect from a business-grade networking provider. The trouble is that he has to order the line through Pac Bell/SBC, then XO has to do the provisioning. And SBC in particular is a huge faceless monopolistic bureaucracy. It's like having desktop support administered by the DMV. It's like-- well, hell, it's the phone company. All the jokes have already been written.
So anyway, mid-June, and they send out the order. They promise, by the way, that they will have the T1 installed by July 1. Over the ensuing three weeks, however, it transpires from a series of calls to the provider, who tries desperately to get a human voice on the line from within the SBC monolith and not just a terse computerized status message, that the SBC site surveyors have tried on three separate occasions to come to my house and reconnoiter-- only on all three occasions to go to the wrong address. At one point they misread 1787 as 1878. At another, they mistook Spagthorpe Pines Ct. for Spagthorpe Avenue. (Names and numbers have been changed to protect the-- heh-- innocent.) A third time they got the street number and the street wrong. Each time we deluged them with e-mails and phone calls correcting them, and each time it sent the job back to the end of the Holy Favor Queue, so it meant it cost us another full week each time the site-surveyor guy had to stand in the forecourt of a strip mall somewhere making a bewildered cell-phone call to the mothership about how there wasn't any damn house anywhere in sight.
So that was some time ago, ages ago, ancient history. It's a whole new chapter now.
See, the guy finally came out. He looked up and down our front yard, rubbed his chin, and announced that he had no idea where SBC's junction box was. There was no access hatch. There was one labeled "Pacific Bell", but inside there was only TV cable-- the box had been co-opted by Comcast in their recent upgrade pass (for which, by the way, I am massively grateful). Our phone line was buried. Bare. No conduit. Just the bare two lines, dropped in a trench and covered over. We couldn't even try to dig it up, because of all the gas and electrical and sewer and other lines running through our flower bed.
Why not just do without a phone? I asked. You know-- use the two existing phone lines, the existing four wires, to carry the T1. We could put in a new phone line at our leisure. But no-- proceeedure. They'd have to shut off the phone line, verify its being shut off, then put in the work orders to get the T1 provisioned; that would take another week or two, and meanwhile we'd have no phone or network. And while the whole point of this exercise is ostensibly so we can have Internet connectivity at home, we're currently using the phone line as a 24-hour dialup so friends can come over and play MMORPGs all night long. So scratch that.
So we had to dig a new trench and lay new conduit. Which we did. Or, more correctly, we had a guy do it for us. It was the guy who had come out from the City of San Jose when we called the 1-800-POO-GAS-10-10-987-12500DOWNTHECENTER call-before-you-dig number, to mark the sidewalk where the buried lines were. (You call the number, an automated signal is sent out over the Sub-Etha, and hundreds of scuttling bureaucrats come swooping by in vans with cans of orange and red paint, marking where the water and cable and electrical and other lines all go, and then vanish into the night.) So the city guy came back and offered to dig the trench for us. "Times are tough," he said. He was out of work, having previously been a contractor for the phone company. His clothes and car weren't as nice as those worn by the SBC site-surveyor, but he got a whole helluva lot more of my respect. Especially considering how hot a day it was, and how he did the whole job by hand. By choice.
So now there's a trench running through our flowerbed, a four-inch gully cut across our concrete walkway that goes around the side of the house (the ground underneath was apparently once the parking lot for the power substation next door, so it's clay and sand that's packed super-hard-- or, as we like to call it in the parlance, concrete; so no digging the dirt out from under the walkway), and a conduit endpoint sticking up out of the ground next to the input box at the side of the house. The other end of the conduit is in a hole next to the sidewalk, and there's a rope running the length of the conduit, the better to pull the phone line through when the time comes.
Which, we now learn, is an indeterminate time away.
We called the SBC guy back (I wouldn't let him leave, the day he came out and rubbed his chin, without leaving an accurate human name and cell-phone number), and let him know that the trench was ready. So he told us he'd get back to us. And get back to us he did-- yesterday.
I don't know whether he had to go to the house to find this out, or if he just made the proclamation from his truck on the freeway somewhere; but his new insight is that well, fine, we have a trench now-- but SBC still has no idea where the buried junction box is. But-- oh, and here's the best part-- their suspicion is that it's buried directly under the sidewalk.
They have to find out for sure. So SBC Man waits three days for the time-sensitive task to ferment properly, then sends out the work order to have some "exploratory digging" done-- apparently they couldn't have done this any earlier, like at the same time we were getting the trench dug-- and see if they can't find that box. For all we know, we might have put the trench ten feet away from the box. But hell, it's in their court now; all we had to do was get the line to the curb. Now it's up to them. And they have to pay for it. (I've even heard stories about the phone company coming out to install a line, tearing up the sidewalk and a slice of the road, laying the line, repaving the sidewalk and the road, and being done before the sun set. This was the provider's SBC liaison guy whose story it was.) Theoretically my work is done.
Except that if the box does turn out to be under the sidewalk, they'll have to get a permit from the city to dig up the sidewalk. Which means another week or two. And we won't know until tomorrow whether we'll have to do that. But after that they have to recondition the line, because in the 13 years since the neighborhood was built, apparently all of Western technology was invented, and the pavement and technology were all laid down together under the assumption that 1950s equipment would suffice us for the next century at least, or until the nukes flew and leveled the cul-de-sac and allowed us all to start afresh without any of those pesky flower gardens or homeowners to get in the way.
Fine. I'm resigned to the idea of not having any net at home for another couple of months. The provider called me here at work a few minutes ago for a status report and to ask me how things were coming on my end, and I had great fun telling him. I'm past the phase of being angry or frustrated, and am now just enjoying making up new adjectives to use over the phone. Again, the provider guy is being superlatively helpful and sympathetic-- there's just nothing he can do. The moment there is, you can bet, that damn line will be hooked up and we'll be sailing happily away into the bitstream. But for now, we wait. And I try to write desultory book chapters on a machine with no access to Software Update.
I'm sure CapLion will tell me that if I lived in New York, this would all have been taken care of with a tip of the hat by smiling Maytag repairmen six weeks ago. I have to imagine that if we were ordering the T1 from SBC directly, instead of getting it relabeled through a provider, there wouldn't have been any of that "escalation to the manager level" or "not being able to find the address for three weeks"; you'd think, being the phone company, they might even have been able to call the number and ask where the house was, or even look in their database and see where the line was hooked up. But I'm sure that this is all just atonement for some non-specific sin I've committed, and as long as I suffer it in silence (except for long-winded typing) I'll have redeemed myself like Douglas Adams' England.
That's my theory, anyway. And until I come up with a better one, it's what I'll stick to.
Fingers crossed for the damn box being accessible without having to dig up the sidewalk.
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| Monday, July 28, 2003 |
16:23 - Woody Allen, please call your agent
http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=07282003
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Don't get me wrong, I have the requisite gleeful surreptitious Achewood habit. But:
Uh-huh. Didn't Lileks say that France's opinion of America comes from the 1968 issue of Playboy, and Rachel Lucas observe that most Germans' impression of the US is informed primarily by Baywatch?
Beef, heal thyself.
Jeff Goldblum. Cripes. And what appears to be a CRT monitor. If Onstad is playing this straight, which I suppose I have no reason to believe he is, it means his last Mac contact was circa 1997.
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| Friday, July 25, 2003 |
15:47 - Meanwhile, on a different planet...
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/25/sharpton.ap/index.html
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Sharpton: "I agree with what Bush is doing, and support more of the same! Shame on him! He's a racist!"
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14:20 - What do you want from us?
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=7607_Naked_Arab_Hypocrisy_on_Display
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Arab Street: "We will not believe that Uday and Qusay have really been killed unless you show us pictures of the bodies."
US: "Okay, here they are."
Arab Street: "Aaaahhh! That's un-Islamic!"
Geez louise. As Lileks said back in late March or so, whatever.
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13:30 - To put it another way
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LGF uses the words "moral clarity" to describe this piece by Barbara Lerner on the nature of the Israeli/Palestinian struggle, and rightly so.
But then, elsewhere in my lunch-hour web-prowling, I get this:
See, you can't be considered "wise" unless you rebuff the seduction of "moral clarity". The harlot.
When I was growing up, I always dreaded reading the word "moral" in some opinion column or other, because invariably it was ensconced in a right-wing tirade about how society is going to hell in a handbasket-- moral decline, loss of moral centers, moral degeneration, the ominous-to-me Moral Majority, and so on. Since my life was pretty damned nice, and I had a whole bunch of options open to me as to how I should choose to live, none of which seemed very threatening, many of which even seemed to have been tarred with an unfair propagandizing brush and were actually very innocuous and empowering-- well, small wonder I should take reflexive offense at the word "moral" and put up my blast shields. It always seemed to be a relic of some bygone time, used by frowning elderly ladies to condemn gay people or pot smokers or people who play video games, and I felt I could do without such a fossil of an idea, thank you very much.
I think a lot of people grew up thinking that way; they just never reversed their travel down that ideological path once 9/11 came along. Instead, it seems more and more as though when someone warns against "moral clarity" who is old enough to know better, it's because he had learned to revere moral relativism purely because it enabled him to do the things that the rest of the world condemns, without feeling any inner guilt or sense of wrongness about it. It's so that when the rest of the world says something judgmental with certainty, you can turn around and say the opposite, because hey, it's your viewpoint and your viewpoint is equally valid.
"Oh, Bart, there is no such place! ...Or, to put it another way... there... is."
Some arguments deserve that kind of treatment, because the rest of the world needs to have its moral position altered, and will in time; other things, though, do not. But with moral relativism propped up on a pedestal, how does one distinguish between the two?
There's a difference between saying "I disagree with your moral position" and saying "Morals are bunk".
Now people who grew up with the idea that "morals are what keeps gays down", the ones who would pick the latter statement above, are using the same language to say that "We deserved 9/11" or "Israelis are the real terrorists".
Nowadays, when I see the word "moral", I don't see an enemy; I see a hinge on which the larger point of whatever sentence it's buried in turns. There are cases where the concept of morality gets applied inappropriately, or in which I don't agree with what someone else thinks are correct morals. But I don't deny their very existence anymore, because they are stupefyingly useful things to have-- and in the event of a 9/11, we would have missed them if they were gone.
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| Thursday, July 24, 2003 |
11:14 - Insanity
http://coldfury.com/archives/001431.php#001431
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Mike at Cold Fury has done what I don't have the will to do: written a cathartic post about the stupefying reaction we've been seeing from the Left to the deaths of Uday and Qusay. It's not a long post, nor a very refreshingly vitriol-filled one; rather, it's faltering and even a little bit resigned-- the way I've been feeling, the reason why I haven't been able to write anything on the subject. I think I know now why I've been feeling so very tired over the past couple of days.
I know that kids under, say, 16 really don't know what they're talking about when it comes to politics; they'll happily espouse completely horrifying viewpoints just because they sound cool. That's all I can imagine explaining this:
Doesn't a part of you wish that Queasy and Duh-day were alive?
I'll admit they're scum and rightfully so, but anything that lands as even more humiliation on W's grotesque shrivelled face is that much the better.
It's sad, really, that as despicable as they are, Saddam's family seems to be the lesser of two evils when you compare them to the wretched little bastard occupying the White House and destroying America in the process...
And I only quote that one because it's particularly representative and memetic, not because similar sentiments (slightly more tactfully worded) haven't been soaking the online and broadcast world, across the mainstream spectrum.
All I'm saying is, shouldn't there be some kind of age requirement for getting on the Net?
Not that that would help. Apparently people from all walks of life are having a hard time seeing why killing Uday and Qusay is a good thing. The fact that Bush exists trumps all.
Lest anyone get the impression that I'm some kind of unquestioning Bush supporter, um, no, I'm not. I think there are many things he could be doing far better. There are also many things he could be doing far worse. About par for the course for a President in an extraordinarily trying historical time.
But I swear, I am so goddamned physically drained after seeing this unrelenting stream of utter bilge from the reactionary Left, especially in reaction to what should have been an unquestionably uniting and praiseworthy event, that I can't even sleep well. I saw some of those conspiracy-theory-munching goons in my dreams last night.
For a long time I've been able to reassure myself, based on poll numbers during the war and such, that most of this country was too smart, too moral, too mentally clear to be sucked in by the endless "yellowcake" bleating and the hammering of these legions of hateful little trolls; but I'm afraid. I really am. I'm afraid that enough people take news sources like the BBC seriously enough, and ascribe enough credibility to any headline that stays on the news for more than two days, that the Left's tactics-- if tactics are what they are-- are working. And if so, it means my faith in the American public to make the right choices is seriously shaken.
That's such a depressing thought that I'm going to have to avoid this subject altogether for some time.
UPDATE: Specifically, some people seem to have the same vacuous, unresearched understanding of the word "McCarthyism" that they do of the terms "Free Speech" or "First Amendment".
God, I hate when people don't do their homework and then get treated like rock stars. It's like high school all over again.
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| Wednesday, July 23, 2003 |
12:52 - There's a name for that sort of thing
http://www.dickgephardt2004.com/releases/pp_foreignpolicy.html
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Several people have been commenting on this speech by Dick Gephardt in which he says with complete seriousness that the greatest threats to this country are those created by our unwillingness to cooperate with international legal bodies, for our own safety and security-- for instance, the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty.
Now, never mind the arguments that have already been put forth and dished about, for instance by Bill Whittle, who notes that "Even the proponents of Kyoto admit that if fully ratified, it would only delay their own worst-case model’s warming by two or three years over the next century. And all we have to do is wreck the world’s economy." While that's certainly worthwhile, I have a different observation to make.
The other day I heard (on NPR, where else) some guy moaning about how we hadn't signed the Kyoto treaty, thumbing our noses at the rest of the world and the 178 countries who have dutifully signed the accord. He said that countries like Russia have signed it, and their greenhouse gas emissions have been steadily dropping ever since; but over the course of the 1990s, while the US had made some token statements to the effect that we would be attempting to scale back our emissions over time, each year our emissions grew significantly. We appeared, in essence, not only to not be cooperating, but to not be trying to cooperate.
But this guy on the radio noted a critical little piece of information: that Russia's emissions were falling not because they were working to comply with the treaty's regulations, but because their overall economy is shrinking. Industry is scaling back. Factories are closing. So naturally their greenhouse gas emissions are dropping.
Kinda makes the US look a little less malicious, unless you consider success in itself to be malicious. And, we now know, some do.
It also throws some perspective upon those 178 countries that have ratified the treaty. For the vast majority, it was no huge leap to be able to do so. Did anyone fear that Ghana or Nepal were likely to be significant contributors to global warming? It's a no-brainer for non-industrialized nations to sign, or even industrialized nations with small populations. The treaty, it becomes clear, is really only aimed at one specific rogue state.
But that's not even what I was getting at-- it's just the warm-up. The guy on the radio went on to describe how because Russia's economy is shrinking, they are not using their full allocation of "emissions credits"-- and are therefore selling some to the US.
I was coming up to a red light when I heard that, which is fortunate because I would have slammed on the brakes anyway.
Emissions credits?!?
So if I understand this properly: if you're a country that is not in compliance with the Kyoto treaty, or whatever treaty it is that provides for these "credits" that we are a signatory to, you can either put yourself in compliance-- or you can purchase a waiver for yourself in the form of these "emissions credits", buying them from countries that aren't producing enough pollution to be using all the credits that are allocated to them.
In other words, the treaty isn't concerned with pollution at all; it's merely concerned with identifying the successful countries, the ones who can't comply with the treaty's terms without destroying their own economies, and siphoning money out of their coffers and into those of countries that can't help but be in compliance because they're unsuccessful. You can go ahead and pollute, but you have to pay off the poor countries around you.
When the Catholic Church did this, it was called indulgences.
Nowadays, it's mostly known as a bribe.
Or, in slightly different terms, a "sin tax". Levied on the successful, assessed upon the level of success. For the purpose of redistribution of wealth.
I believe I now understand where reasoned cynicism regarding environmental regulation comes from. How come nobody had a booth explaining these stipulations at Earth Day at my high school? If they had booths for Negative Population Growth, Inc., why not this?
Yeah, I know. Stupid question.
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| Tuesday, July 22, 2003 |
13:27 - About frickin' time
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/07/22/sprj.irq.sons/index.html
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CNN's big alert banner has pictures of Uday and Qusay on their respective playing cards, with the headline TRUMPED.
Ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's sons, Qusay and Uday, were killed Tuesday in a gunbattle with U.S. troops in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq said.
Their bodies were identified from "multiple sources," Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez told reporters in Baghdad.
"They died in a fierce gunbattle," Sanchez said. "They resisted detention and the effort of coalition forces to apprehend them."
Of course, now it's anybody's guess whether Saddam's still out there. But it's immensely gratifying that finally we've bagged some really, really big fish.
UPDATE: And, of course, the usual suspects are reacting to this news with every conceivable emotion except for happiness: they're accusing the US of having had the bodies in freezers for weeks, to trot out in order to push "yellowcake" off the headlines; they're lamenting our cold-blooded assassination of two men who should only have been arrested at worst; they're even latching onto the word "sons" as though it implies that Uday and Qusay were innocent kids. And it's not just these slimy little web worm-dungeons either-- the BBC is even putting scare quotes around the word "dead" and what we callously refer to as "good" news.
That's it. I am through with trying to make sense of how people like this can consider themselves moral and rational and informed human beings.
If I were a praying man, I'd pray that they were fewer than they appear.
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11:02 - Amazing coincidence
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=7559_Saddam_and_September_11
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No connection; no connection at all.
Oh, and read the comments; there's a contributor by the name of "evariste" who makes for some fascinating reading.
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| Monday, July 21, 2003 |
13:56 - Smirk me up that grid square
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One of the side effects of having all my worldly possessions-- which primarily consist of things that had been stacked on bookshelves, many of which are in fact books-- strewn about my floor in stacks without any particular place to put them is that I'm tempted to do something I haven't really done in years, since before college: reading.
Now, granted, I never was that much of an adventurous reader. I loved big thick books, but only certain big thick books; I would find a few favorites and read them over and over again. I've been through The Silmarillion some twenty times, for instance, and Watership Down fifteen, and the James Herriot All Creatures Great and Small series until the covers fell off and the paperback spines split. I can't say what the commonalities are between the books I've tended to like, except that I know a book I'll hate the moment I pick it up. Almost all sci-fi/fantasy falls into that category; Tolkien's the one exception to a genre that nearly uniformly makes me furious. And in any case, once I went off to college, my reading time was severely curtailed, and I never really did pick it back up again.
So now that the house work is gradually and slowly beginning to asymptote off, and the things I am doing usually involve a work path as follows: Apply a bead of something, then wait several hours for it to dry; spray a layer of something, then wait several hours for it to dry; apply fingerfuls of something, then wait several hours for it to dry; sand, caulk, prime; paint on a coat of something, then wait several hours for it to dry; repeat; repeat -- I find myself with a number of temporal interstices into which I would normally insert networking time, doing e-mail or blogging or tinkering with code or some such. But that's not possible until the phone company should ever get my house's correct address into their head (they've tried three times now to install the T1, and gone to the wrong address each time, resetting the Beseech a Favor From the Bureaucratic Monopoly clock with each dimwitted call from the middle of a parking lot somewhere miles from my house); and so I find myself sprawling on a couch and reading.
And what should I pick up but the various books by Bill Bryson? They're always a lot of fun, though I should note that they're always funniest the first time through. A long sojourn away from them will also pep them up a little, but I find that if I'm anticipating some cute trick of wording or visualization that I know is coming, such as his extravagant fears in Neither Here nor There about what should happen if he should buy a rubber love doll in Germany and it should flop out of his suitcase and self-inflate in the middle of a crowded subway car, it doesn't give me the lingering, delectable guffaw that I suffered the first time I read that passage-- on a transcontinental red-eye flight, under the dim reading light on my window seat, my paroxysms of silent laughter provoking increasing irritability in the guy sitting next to me and gamely trying to sleep as we soared through the midnight sky over Ohio.
I've always been a fan of Bryson's, I should point out, ever since I was handed a copy of The Mother Tongue by an English teacher at my high school. It's one of the most engaging, comprehensive tomes on the subject of the English language that I've ever run across, and I've read quite a few, many by much more distinguished linguists than he, such as Jespersen and Pei. But I always come back to Bryson. Why? Because there's something about his written wit that I like. It's hard to pin down. He's often described as a Keillor/Kerouac/Barry admixture, but I don't know if that comes near the mark. Bryson spends so much time talking about how bewildered he is by things in the world that I usually find perfectly understandable, and I'm not just talking about computers here, and yet has such a vast wealth of statistics at his fingertips with which to bolster some narrative point or other, that I can never tell if he's as endearingly feckless as he makes himself sound, or if his endless bumbling and gape-mouthed wonder at things like cell phones and underground walkways is all just an elaborate put-on. In which case I find my respect for him is diminished by a significant amount.
Which, I also should note, is the impression I'm regretfully left with after plowing through I'm a Stranger Here Myself, a collection of his columns that he wrote for a local paper after returning to America after living in England for twenty years. Now, I'd loved The Mother Tongue for its wealth of fascinating information wryly delivered; I'd found The Lost Continent, his trek across America, to be uproarious in the best Bryson tradition, though I can't find that one in my bookcase at all now; Notes From a Small Island, about England, was marginally less diverting, mostly because of its monotony; same goes for In a Sunburned Country, on Australia, its interest coming chiefly from the alien nature (to me) of the place. Neither Here Nor There, about his travels through Europe, is the magnum opus, unless it were A Walk in the Woods, the one that really put Bryson on the map, as it were-- his northward hike along the Appalachian Trail. It's in that book that you start to get a glimpse into Bryson's priorities in life, and in I'm a Stranger Here Myself he continues the trend through to its conclusion-- he's willing to devote months toward becoming a wild and scruffy mountain man, able to hike thirty miles a day through sweltering, buzzing mountains, but at heart he's really a cosseted American dad who putters in the yard and wrestles with his taxes and writes long sarcastic tirades about his computer being incomprehensible and unreliable. (DOS-prompt jokes in a 2000 book, even. I wonder.) He spends his Appalachian adventure bemoaning the changing landscape, whose decay he's careful to point out is not always the result of simple crass American industrialism eating away at the natural world-- often it's just, for instance, that the Ice Age is only just now ending, and climates are still changing rapidly, in a geological sense. But over the course of that book and the columns collected in the next, Bryson's disgust with the modern world begins to stick out in sharp relief.
Sure, he remains funny in his later books; that's not in doubt. If I were to characterize his style, I'd say he's what you get if you were to take James Lileks, excise about two pounds of clue from his head along with his conversance with popular entertainment and any smidgen of fascination with modern technology, and instead replace it with several encyclopedias' worth of fascinating environmental and economic and political statistics relating to the past twenty years' worth of American and British history. Also, scoop him up from decidedly practical Minnesota and transplant him to the Imagineered quaintness and contractually quintessent Americana surroundings of New Hampshire, where his neighbors are no doubt the nasally and insufferable cast of Family Guy. And pull the political ripcord and let the spin begin.
There are a lot of points in I'm a Stranger Here Myself where I find myself saying, "Yeah, yeah, I'll let this one slide," with reference to some particularly incisive and slanted barb about something I hold dear. I can take his extravagant rants about the unnecessary complexities of design in personal computers; hell, I write those myself. I can handle his moaning about how the old modular diners from the 30s and 40s are all gone now due to disinterest, but people flock to modern simulations of them like Johnny Rocket's. But I do take exception when I run across those gee-aren't-I-clever statements that I find now and then: If we as a people are advanced enough to send a man to the moon, measure the most distant stars, and cure seemingly incurable diseases, then why can't we design a turn signal that turns itself off if you're not making a turn? or whatever. Things that have very rational explanations, but that I can't explain to the author because this is print media and I can't make myself heard by shouting at the book.
When Bryson spends a column on his slack-jawed stupefaction at the amount of choice you get in American goods and services today, he comes dangerously near to crossing the line: One of the hundreds of cable channels that I get is a twenty-four-hour cartoon network. Perhaps the most astounding thing about this is that the channel has advertisers. What could you possibly sell to people who watch Deputy Dawg at 2:30 AM? Bibs?
Uh, no, Girls Gone Wild videos, of course. Jackass.
Anyway, I understand that Bryson has a new book out in which he denies his statement from I'm a Stranger Here Myself-- that he is competely, woefully clueless about all things scientific, whether physical or chemical or biological or mathematical-- and chronicles the history of the universe and all its component sciences, all in typical smirky Bryson fashion. It might well be fascinating, and I suppose I'd better give it a look, as it stands to reason that it will resemble The Mother Tongue the most closely of all his previous books. And that suits me just fine.
After all, I ought to be able to tell when he's making a salient and amusing or startling point, or when he's blowing a verbal booger like When you are overwhelmed, what is the whelm you are over, and what does it look like? out his nose.
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| Friday, July 18, 2003 |
11:47 - On the Dole
http://www.mikesilverman.com/2003_07_13_log_archive.html#105853978947114687
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Mike Silverman comments on the opening of the grand-sounding Bob Dole Institute of Politics at Kansas University.
Bob Dole was always too conservative for me, but he has a dignity and quiet sense of humor, and a willingness to listen that many of today's ideological politicians, on both right and left, sadly lack. I hope that my generation, facing the threat of world terrorism and Islamic fascism can stand up to evil as well as Bob Dole's generation. I think we can...we have great role models!
I always thought that if only Dole had showed some of the easygoing, self-effacing humor he showed afterwards in Pepsi and Viagra ads during the 1996 election season, he could easily have given Clinton more of a run for his money (maybe not won, but at least come off as less of an old skeleton).
The most telling moment during the debates, to me as a Progressive Concerned Youth, was when some questioner asked them both what their views were on appointing gays and lesbians to high-level government positions.
Dole answered first. He shuffled uneasily behind the podium, kept his eyes down on the floor, shifting back and forth, and said, "My administration would not, uh... discriminate on the basis of, uh... whatever. Skin color, gender, whatever. Orientation, whatever." Then the camera went to Clinton, who looked it straight in the eye and with that familiar doughy congenial smile said that "My administration has already made great strides in furthering the opportunities for gays and lesbians in prominent government positions," enumerating his all-inclusive position confidently and firmly and explicitly, promising to expand it further in his second term. Dole in the background swayed nervously, averting his eyes, mumbling.
"I would like to take this opportunity to announce my fondness for Duff Beeah!"
"I would... also like to... express, er, my fondness for... that particular... beer."
I don't know if I'd have voted for him even if he were running today. But the Dole that showed up in TV ads after the election was over, ruefully grinning "I just can't win" when the store refuses to take his credit card without a photo ID, could not have possibly been more of a contrast from the one behind that podium.
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10:44 - Sunny Day in Arizona; Janeane Garofalo Still a Moron
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Forum this morning had Janeane Garofalo and some other Hollywood turd-- Hector something-or-other-- from "Artists United To Win Without War", as I believe they're now called. God-- I've never heard such a circle-jerk in my life. Garofalo kept bleating out statements like, "Of course Iraq was going to be a Vietnam-esque quagmire; anyone who thinks otherwise is alarmingly ignorant, and I hold the popular media criminally responsible for click!" Actually I don't know if she actually said click; maybe it was just me turning off the radio.
Of course, nowhere to be found in the show was the apology that Garofalo had promised to render if the Iraqis should-- inconceivable!-- welcome the American troops.
The assumption under which these people were operating was interesting indeed, though: it was all focused on the fact that the media is too unconcerned with the negative aspects of the war, too conservative. They blamed the news outlets for focusing on Laci Peterson and Kobe Bryant-- okay, granted that they're guilty of that-- but that instead of that, all the media had to do was to poke just a little bit into the Truth and they would crack wide open this massive scandal of a monstrous Lie that was foisted upon the American public, a war that was fought purely for evil reasons masquerading as righteous force. "Americans have an emotional need," Garofalo said, "to believe in the mythology of America-- that America is always on the side of good and right, and whatever the President says-- unless, of course, he happens to be a Democrat-- goes."
The people behind the Drudge Report, the Coulters and Hannitys, she also said, are doing their work not because of any political reasons, but just because of an emotional need for that same mythology that "right-wingnuts" need to fill. And naturally that extends to all the popular media, all the news organs, all the services that claim to be "giving the people what they want". When they show things like Bush landing on the aircraft carrier, it's the government happily using Hollywood as long as it suits them. And of course now there is new fodder for these people to use in leveraging themselves back out of the woodwork-- videotapes of soldiers wanting to come back home, reports of the casualty count exceeding that of Desert Storm-- which they're happily pouncing on (making sure, of course, to paint on their Sympathetic Sad Faces before wagging their fingers on-air and blaming the families of the soldiers for not knowing what kind of corrupt bloodthirsty military machine their sons and daughters were signing up for).
What's most stunning about this whole matter is just, as I have to keep telling myself, because otherwise I just can't believe it, that these people have honestly convinced themselves that our invading Iraq was a bad thing.
I wonder how well one of Garofalo's cynical stand-up routines would play in Baghdad?
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| Wednesday, July 16, 2003 |
11:08 - Pay attention now
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ZEP.
RIT.
DAP.
MEP.
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11:02 - Stupid Nature
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So I was stripping caulk (huh huh) off my bathroom sink last night in preparation for touch-up painting and recaulking, when I looked into the bathtub and noticed that there was a large stream of ants pouring out of a tiny crack in the grout and milling around down in the drain area. Now, ants are one of the things I'd hoped I had left behind in the old house, but I'm thinking that that was a fool's hope; even after the house had remained effectively empty of food for some three months before we moved in, the ants came billowing out of the woodwork with the very first Coke can that was left out on the counter overnight. So it's either regular tent treatments, or a stepped-up Grin-N-Bear-It campaign.
I've been grinning and bearing it for a few weeks now, and to their credit the ants have been behaving themselves better after that initial night of Coke-induced carousing; they've only made scattered and inexplicable appearances, such as swarming over a plate in the sink with baked-on chicken juice, while bypassing sniffily a whole open box of cookies. I've given up trying to understand the little buggers. Their tastes bewilder me, but if they don't like our cooking, I won't lose sleep if they complain.
So imagine my surprise when I saw-- in my otherwise spotless bathtub-- this cloud of ants gathered around a mysterious puddle of material near the drain. On close inspection I couldn't determine its nature. I looked up at the ceiling-- did something leak through and drip down? Is there a dead candy clown in the attic? Nope. Did the paint touch-up I'd done the previous day somehow fall bodily off the wall and curl up in the tub? Did ants like latex paint? I wouldn't put it past them. But no, that wasn't it either.
Then I noticed it: the round metal cover above the drain, under the faucet, the thing that has that weird toggle lever in some tubs but not this one, was slightly open along the bottom, in a slit along the tub line, as though for ventilation. Into this slit was stuffed a dead moth.
Whether it had crawled in there itself or had been dragged in by amazingly industrious land wasps, this moth was now being carted away in bite-sized pieces into the crawl space. I sat on the toilet and stared at the spectacle for a good ten minutes before grabbing up tissues and noxious chemicals and embarking on the vigorous cleaning process. It would probably behoove me to caulk up that slit while I'm at it, unless it's actually important for drainage or something. But all throughout, all that occupied my mind was a general sense of wounded pride and baleful stolidity, the kind you get if some jokester dupes you after long and careful skepticism into believing some bizarre tale, upon which he laughs in your face and goes SUCKER!
I kept thinking, Yeah, very funny, nature.
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| Monday, July 14, 2003 |
16:47 - Well spotted, Bruce!
http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/2/1058130053
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It is a small world...
Report on Bay Rait and Weta at the Aussie FX and Animation Festival
Tehanu @ 5:00 pm EST
Lolly's Report from the Australian Effects and Animations Festival held in Melbourne back in May, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Federation Square. This happened back in May, but I don't think we got such a detailed and funny report as this at the time.
Lolly writes:
Firstly Bay introduced himself and gave a brief run down on his role at Weta, which in TTT was building hero facial systems. He discussed what would be discussed and shown, and we were treated to a 50 minute tape of behind the scenes.
I do believe that's Bonnie Raitt's nephew Bay Raitt, who graduated from my high school, Ukiahi, after my freshman or sophomore year. He was always a performing-artsy type, big and imposing, with a deep booming voice. (He played Charlemagne for the school's production of Pippin, and boy did he look the part.) Everyone expected great things from him. I'd heard offhand that he had gone into film animation, and thence to Weta Digital, where he was working on the Lord of the Rings movies.
And now he's in the spokesman's role, giving demos at animation festivals.
Sweeet.
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11:11 - Any port in a storm, eh?
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There seems to be a problem with a certain lack of critical thinking in America today. At least among the media personalities. If there weren't those opinion polls which stubbornly insist that most people still think going to war was the right thing to do, I'd be starting to despair that this mental laziness were becoming an epidemic.
NPR all throughout the weekend-- particularly on Saturday, to and from the concert in Sacramento, which featured Three Dog Night, Lou Christie, and The Association, among others-- was giddily gleeful in all its headings. The dubious information that was used to justify the war in Iraq! To hear these headlines, you'd think someone had just sleuthed up a secret dossier titled EYES ONLY: OPERATION SCAPEGOAT. ZOG CENTRAL.
On Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, as usual, they led off with their typical raucous Bush-bashing; it was all the more maddening given the recent flap over the Nigerian yellow-cake business. According to the hosts, when confronted with the evidence of prevarication and subterfuge, Bush responded with wide-eyed confusion befitting a toddler. The hosts giggled and dished back and forth for a few minutes, then mentioned that Ari Fleischer had said, "I think the burden of proof lies with those who said Saddam didn't have any weapons of mass destruction-- it's up to them to say where they are." Clearly going for the "You can't make up stuff like this" vibe, one of the hosts followed this up with, "What, is Ari going for a stand-up comedy career after this? I mean, at some point you have to just sit and marvel." Another added, "Hey, it's Comical Ari!"
And that's the infuriating bit: unless you think about it, Fleischer's comment does seem like the stuff of ripe parody-- unless you think about it. I wanted to reach into the radio and grab those guffawing hosts by their lapels and do what I've grown far too tired of doing: explain the reasoning behind the statement. That being that everybody knew Saddam had WMDs, including the UN, Hans Blix, Bill Clinton, the State Department, France, Germany, Russia-- nobody was disputing any of that. We knew Saddam had used WMDs, against Halabja, against Iran, and against our troops in Desert Storm. Iraq had many of those same weapons when the inspectors were expelled in 1998. This was a fact, never in any doubt. Where the weapons went between 1998 and now-- if indeed they aren't in Iraq-- is an interesting question, and one that ought to be answered (if only because we'd rather find them before al Qaeda does); but there is no logical means by which the failure to find the weapons constitutes a lie on the part of the administrations of the US or or Britain in the lead-up to the war. Nor does it change the fact that nit-picking at the dotted I's and crossed T's of the pre-war justification is not just petty and stupid, but an insult to the people of Iraq, some six to nine thousand of whom would have died in the time since March if we hadn't removed Saddam, and whose children would still be in prisons, whose family members would still be in torture chambers, and whose compatriots would still be buried in unmarked mass graves. Complete the sentence: Though none of the other grievances against him are in any doubt, Saddam may not in fact have tried to buy yellow-cake from Niger. Therefore: __________________
(I know! I know! Therefore... he wasn't a bad guy after all, meant us no ill will, never harbored a WMD program, and was loved by his people-- and we ousted an innocent man!)
Statements like Fleischer's seem like self-parody only if you don't think about them. And that's what really gets me: apparently the majority of the American public is able to see and grasp the logic of his reasoning, while the visible media personalities to whom they tune their radios and TVs-- whose job it is to keep up with and interpret the news-- can't. To them, it's all just the obfuscation of a bunch of unelected dunderheads steering this country to ruin, and isn't that just so tragic that we have to laugh to keep from crying?
They also made fun of Ah-nuld's chances at the California governorship, and his recent statements wherein he compared himself politically to Nelson Mandela. Apparently never having listened to a word the man has said on political subjects, they dismissed him out of hand on the basis of-- what? Apparently the fact that he's still making movies as a character actor. "Schwartzenegger's potential voting constituency is bodybuilders, pro wrestlers, movie fans, and Howard Stern," the hosts quipped, adding that "Well, hey, that's most of California." They then said that the next thing to expect would be Keanu Reeves explaining in a press conference why he's like James Madison.
It's funny, so it must be true.
We've trained ourselves not to accept anything on face value-- to assume that there's always more to the story, to assume that whoever's in power is trying to dupe the public, especially if they're Republicans. There's always some nefarious subplot. If one isn't obvious in what people say, then that's just evidence of conspiracy.
It must be an amazingly unfulfilling life, to be that suspicious all the time.
Now people are calling in to Greg Kihn's radio show and stating bluntly that "There are no weapons of mass destruction." And, presumably, there never were. Nor was there ever a Saddam Hussein or an Osama bin Laden. Or a World Trade Center.
UPDATE: Oh, and even Congresspeople are getting into the act. Some guy who said he voted for war is saying that he's shocked, shocked, at the recent revelations. When pressed, he won't say he was "duped" into voting for war, but clearly, clearly the war was fought under false pretenses and therefore for some sinister purpose of the Administration's. Condi Rice knew! She told Tenet to take the fall! Bush didn't know because he's an imbecile! Now an innocent dictatorship has fallen and a people has been ruthlessly liberated to their own destiny! Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!
The cognitive feedback loop on the left may have become such that there won't be a voice from there that anybody can take seriously until after a major shakeup-- like on the scale of the death of certain political parties. Bring back the Whigs and Federalists!
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| Friday, July 11, 2003 |
19:03 - You can't make this stuff up
http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=21464
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There was probably a time, back in the Enlightenment days, when it looked for all the world as though the longer the planet Earth lasted, the more history unfolded, the more knowledge humanity accumulated, the wiser all people would become. People would try grander and grander experiments in science and social engineering and justice and government, and the good ones would succeed and the bad ones would fail. And the cumulative effect of these shared dabblings in the human experience would make us all happier, richer, more decent individuals with an advanced understanding of how humanity works commensurate with the luxury in which the poorest of us live our lives compared to even the richest nobility of earlier ages.
Boy, would they have been surprised to see 2003.
French virtuoso keyboardist François-René Duchable plans to end his career this summer by destroying two grand pianos and burning his concert suit to protest what he sees as the bourgeois elitism of the classical music world, The Times of London reports.
According to The Times, Duchable, 51, told the French Catholic newsaper La Croix that his life as a touring pianist has been "hell" and he delivered blistering parting attacks on some of his fellow musicians.
Alfred Brendel's latest recording, Duchable said, is "discouragingly artificial." Maurizio Pollini has "worn himself out from repeating the same things" and Martha Argerich has "managed to become a myth by always playing the same four concertos."
Duchable told La Croix: "The piano is a symbol of a certain domineering bourgeois and industrial society that has to be destroyed. Used as this society uses it, the piano is an arrogant instrument which excludes all those that don't know about music."
The pianist says he plans to create a sensation with his final three concerts, according to The Times. The first concert, scheduled for the end of July, will end with a piano crashing into Lake Mercantour. The second will finish with his recital suit on fire and the third will culminate with the mid-air explosion of a grand piano to make the statement that "the concert is dead."
After the concerts, Duchable plans to strap a portable keyboard to his bicycle and pedal around France giving impromptu performances, the Times says.
"I have had enough of sacrificing my life for 1 per cent of the population" Duchable said. "I have had enough of participating in a musical system which, in France at least, functions badly and limits classical music to an elite."
Where did we go wrong, Mr. Whittle? How has humanity come to such a pass? Why is it that the closer we get to soaring into the stars, the more we yearn to live miserable thirty-year lives in primitive villages surrounded by wild beasts, fearful even to build a campfire for fear that it would pollute the air, or to murder an animal for food?
Why is it that rather than a dapper and urbane inventive adult on the brink of cosmic enlightenment, our species resembles nothing so much as a suicidal teenager?
(Via a commenter at LGF.)
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| Thursday, July 10, 2003 |
13:43 - Tetris is so unrealistic
http://bash.org/
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Blame Chris for this one. Actually I get the feeling I really should have known about this site for a long time, but it somehow slipped my attention. It's bash.org, a database of quips captured from IRC sessions. Some are obviously staged, but many aren't, and if you look at the Top 50 you'll get all the best ones right off.
<BombScare> i beat the internet
<BombScare> the end guy is hard
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| Wednesday, July 9, 2003 |
16:31 - So that's where we're going
http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2003_07.html#004146
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According to Andrew Sullivan, AOL will be unveiling blogging software soon; apparently whoever's in charge of the project "gets it", and that's all to the good. Far be it from me to cheer for AOL, but I've got to admit that even the ads are starting to get a little less annoying. (That one with the Franciscan Friars is actually pretty funny.) And now that they're in an earnest fight against MSN, they're actually starting to incorporate some useful features, like (gasp!) the ability to sort your e-mail. Trivial, one might say, yes-- but there's something to be said for keeping the interface even simpler than, say, a Mac's-- because for the vast silent majority of users, missing features are far less important than the ability to just do and understand the basics. All they have to do now is overhaul their pathologically dire support infrastructure, and they may have a fighting chance.
As for the blogging software: hey, good. Sure, maybe it means they're just giving birth to another LiveJournal; but if these reports are correct, they're not going after LiveJournal's target audience. They're going after the kinds of people who demand the sorts of features you get in Movable Type-style blogs, plus unique perks like the ability to post straight from IM clients. Cool.
Now, it must be said that blogging software is not rocket science. One thing that's mystified me for the past couple of years is just how difficult a time some of the blogging systems have had in keeping things straight. BlogSpot has had its perennial archiving/permalinking problems; Movable Type had some scandal recently. What's the problem, exactly? Blogging software is in fact stupefyingly easy to write. I wrote mine in just under three hours, a year and a half ago, and have barely had to modify it since then. I'm not saying the design of my system is any good, either-- there are some design decisions I might have made differently if I had it to do again, but that wouldn't have made the project materially more difficult. It's really a very simple concept. A blog is a degenerate case of a message board, itself a very straightforward piece of code to write. All you're doing is providing a schema whereby one or more people can write messages into a database, and then display the last few entries. Even the ancillary features aren't hard. Searching? Easy if you know how to do it. Comments? No problem. TrackBacks? Takes a little cleverness, but there's not much to it. Archiving? Depends on how you do it, but it can amount to almost nothing under the hood. XML? Easy. I'm not saying I speak from some kind of oracular position on the subject here, but compared to some database-driven web applications, blogging is an absurdly simple proposition. So how come some outfits have such a tough time of it?
Mostly load management, I think. Server-side execution can really kill things on a heavily centralized system, especially if a post gets Slashdotted; generating static pages is one solution, but it's not a total one. In order to really hold up, you've got to have a dedicated server farm with lots of redundancy and backups, and there aren't many services out there with more of those things than AOL.
So does this mean blogging is about to "grow up"? That the floodgates are about to be opened, with the legitimacy granted the Web upon the release of Netscape 1.1? Could be. Then again, it might be the death of the blogosphere as we know it; it might morph into something we don't recognize, something too big to handle, something where the current nexuses of attention lose their tether points and get washed away in the tide. I remember when AOL opened up USENET access to its users; the classic newsgroup structure was effectively useless from that day forward. It might have died the same death by spam and Me-Too-ism anyway, but AOL certainly hastened its demise.
I wonder if AOL's getting its hand into the game means a formalization of the tip-jar concept, too?
Nothing to do but wait and see, I suppose...
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| Monday, July 7, 2003 |
12:37 - What'd I miss?
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Now that's what I call a good long weekend.
Boy-howdy, did we ever get stuff done. We've cleaned out the garage, for one thing; that was sorely needed. With the help of doughty friends, we dragged everything out of there and sorted it in the driveway into piles of stuff to a) keep, b) give to Goodwill or someone, and c) hurl away. The third pile, it should surprise nobody, ended up dwarfing both the others. Enough so that I just ordered another 12-cubic-yard debris box to pile it all in. The sooner the better, too, because hidden in the piles of crap are lots of boards with nails in them and other such slobbering-alien-repelling weaponry, and there are inquisitive toddlers roaming around the cul-de-sac and just aching to discover new sharp objects on which to brain themselves. It'll be arriving tomorrow.
So then we were able to start moving the boxes from inside the house into the garage, which means we can now walk around more or less with standard human mobility, instead of navigating through towering cardboard canyons in every room. Naturally the dog is all used to the canyons now, so he's watching worriedly as the boxes gradually dissolve from his field of view. "What-- are we moving again?" he asks.
We got the major drapery done, too-- the living room now has our elegantly hung green curtains, with an 8-foot span across the bottom part of the picture window and then a peaked and stapled upper part that we're quite proud of. See, we (actually, Lance) took a six-foot curtain rod and mitre-cut it so it could be screwed together at a 90-degree angle. Then we hung that against the peaked top of the picture window, and hung curtains from the sloped sides so they sort of bunch together in the middle, but in a cool way. They can be separated and gathered at the corners of the peak so as to let in the sun, or pinned behind the TV to keep things cool. It works very well indeed, and it preserves the shape of the window even when closed. Slam-dunk.
My bathroom is just about done; I've finished untaping most of it, and the mirrors are up, with matching frosted edges against the green background. I still need to finish some touch-up painting, the door trim, and the crown molding up top; and the toilet could stand to be replaced. But that's something that can happen at our leisure. There's a new shower head, so I can now take showers without feeling like that shrieking guy at the end of the 70s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is pointing accusingly at me.
Oh! And I've gotten moving on the new book; at least, I've finished putting together the proposal TOC. This was an interesting adventure. See, the book is supposed to cover 10.3 "Panther"; and thanks to benevolent forces which shall remain nameless, I have such a beast in my hot little hands. So I thought I'd install it on my G4, which has two disks; see, the way the Panther DP works is that there's no upgrade path from it; you can't upgrade from it to the final shipping version of Panther, you can only do a wipe-clean installation, which will trash all your installed drivers and such. So I wanted to put 10.3 on the second disk, leaving the 10.2.6 on the primary disk untouched. But the installer didn't want to cooperate. Taking a cue from Windows 2000's installer, it seemed dead-set on thwarting me. Here's what happened: I would put in the CD; it would say, "Oh! you want to install, do you? Press Restart and the installation process will begin." And it would write to the boot blocks that it wanted to boot from CD, and restart. It would boot into CD. Or not. See, it would get to the gray Apple logo screen, and then freeze. It wasn't a hard freeze; the little twirly "wait" icon would still twirl. But it would never get anywhere. So I'd reset, and the same thing would happen; I'd reset and hold down "C" (to boot from CD); the same thing would happen. Or wait! No! It's actually booting-- though it took like half an hour for it to happen. So I don't know whether it would have finished booting all those other times if I'd just let it sit, or what. But it finally got to the installer screen, after nearly an hour, and plodded through the installer process unnecessarily slowly. In fact, it took some six hours to complete. (I know because I'd opened up the installer log, and it had convenient timestamps for all the events as they happened.) Then "Installer requested restart," said the log, and it rebooted. But apparently it hadn't cleanly installed, because it booted right back into the CD (it came right up this time), and started installing all over again. Crumbs.
So I aborted the process and tried booting from the hard disk. See, on a Mac, you can hold down Option after booting, and it will give you a listing of all bootable volumes. (You can bet this will get a special mention in the "Tips and Tricks You Probably Didn't Know About" chapter.) Select one of the icons and press the Boot button, and off it goes; it's non-persistent, though, and to permanently set the boot device, you have to use the Startup Disk preferences. Anyway-- so I tried booting from the half-installed 10.3 disk; and it ... got to the gray screen and froze. For hours. I went to sleep, got up later, and it was still there, twirling glumly away on the logo screen in the gray pre-dawn. So I shut it off and gave up.
Then it occurred to me: something that had been nagging at my mind ever since I'd read the Read Me file, absorbed its contents, and filed it away in the "Root around in later after you realize you threw something away that you needed" bin. And that was the stern warning that you could only install 10.3 on a Mac selected from a strict list (I was), that had an Apple-supplied video card and no third-party PCI cards (I wasn't). I knew it-- I knew I'd regret installing that new ATI card six months ago and throwing away my old factory Rage 128. Blah! Plus the machine has an Adaptec SCSI card in it. So I figured that had to be the culprit. The DP of Panther probably doesn't have all the third-party drivers done; since the system would occasionally boot (the freeze point was always right after it probed the USB devices, as I could tell from booting in Visual mode-- Command-V), and since it had the nice mouse drop-shadow and everything, I figured the video card probably wasn't to blame. It was probably that damned SCSI card.
I had a few options before me. I could try taking out the SCSI card, and maybe digging up video cards and swapping them in and out; but that just seemed so... so... exactly like what I was dealing with whenever I tried to install Win2K. Granted, this is a developer's preview, not even a public beta; but still, I felt I shouldn't have to do this. It was much simpler to just play by the stated rules.
This meant installing it on my iBook. But wait! The iBook only has one disk; and unlike Mac OS 9, where you could install lots of different copies of the OS onto the same disk (a bootable OS consisted solely of a System Folder that had been "blessed" properly-- it could exist anywhere on the system, deep inside folder trees, wherever), OS X can only be installed once per partition. (I hope they streamline this-- I've heard that they're working on it, but it's hard to get all those invisible UNIX directories to behave properly.) I was in no mood to try partitioning my disk. So then... what?
My iPod gleamed at me from the corner of my desk. Of course!
I plugged the iPod into the G4 and enabled manual mode, and deleted all the songs from it. Then I unplugged it and fired up the iBook, and plugged it in. Tossed in the Panther disk; rebooted to begin installation. It booted almost instantly. It asked which disk to install it on; with a flourish and a doffing of my flowing black cape, I selected the iPod. And it installed quickly and smoothly, taking less than 45 minutes all told. (I further suspect the SCSI card in the G4 as the culprit, now; it was behaving as though it had to keep waiting for the card to give it some kind of approval to continue, a signal that was never forthcoming.) It rebooted, the iPod clicking away in my hand, and asked for the second disc, which I happily fed it. It finished eating and spit out the bones of the CD, and rebooted again. O happy day! Behold: the joy of Panther!
Now I have a bootable copy of the OS in my pocket; I can take it to work and boot my iMac with it, so I can see the more video-intensive things like the hideously gratuitous (and therefore utterly delicious) Fast User Switching feature, and of course Exposé. I can take it to the park with my laptop, boot it into Panther, and explore the half-finished features and guess at what they'll eventually do. I can take it home, plug it into my G4, and watch it freeze at the gray logo screen. Then I can pretend it's the G5 that will be arriving just as soon as my bank account dips below the amount I'll need in order to pay for it.
This stuff's fun even when it goes kablooey!
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| Wednesday, July 2, 2003 |
18:59 - Virtual Friday!
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Since I'm still without net at home, and since there's no work tomorrow or Friday, that means there might be no blogging happening until... ugh. Monday. Maybe I'll sneak in to work to do some stuff, if interesting things happen. But most likely not.
Happy 4th, everybody!
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12:51 - What Makes a Lie
http://www.rachellucas.com/archives/000682.html#000682
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While I wasn't looking, a few days ago Rachel Lucas posted Michael Moore's latest letter to the President in its entirety. She didn't really even have it in herself to fisk it, because-- and she's entirely right in this-- "it sort of takes care of itself anyway".
Your blatant refusal to back up your verbal deception with the kind of fake evidence we have become used to is a slap in our collective American face. It's as if you are saying, "These Americans are so damn apathetic and lazy, we won't have to produce any weapons to back up our claims!" If you had just dug a few silo holes in the last month outside Tikrit, or spread some anthrax around those Winnebagos near Basra, or "discovered" some plutonium with that stash of home movies of Uday Hussein feeding his tigers, then it would have said to us that you thought we might revolt if you were caught in a lie. It would have shown us some *respect*. We honestly wouldn't have cared if it later came out that you planted all the WMD -- sure, we'd be properly peeved, but at least we would have been proud to know that you knew you HAD to back up your phony claims with the real deal!
I guess you finally figured that out this week. It started to appear that millions of us were calling you on your bluff -- those "fictitious reasons for the fictitious war." So you quickly produced this man and his rose bush and some 12-year old piece of paper and some metal parts. CNN broke in at 5:15pm and screamed they had the exclusive! "IRAQI NUCLEAR PLANS FOUND!" But a few good reporters started asking some hard questions -- and, barely 3 hours later, your own administration was forced to admit the plans were "not the smoking gun” proving that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
She's right... I can't think of anything helpful to say either.
Except the obvious, which is this:
Moore finds it patently more plausible that: <deep breath> Bush and the Pentagon, the State Department, backed up by Clinton, the UN's weapons inspectors, France, Germany, Russia, Iran, and China, fabricated a case out of whole cloth for war against Saddam; sowed dissent within the ranks of the conspirators so that none but the Brits, Aussies, Poles, and Americans actually were willing to commit military troops, and the others were willing to damage their own economies and diplomatic standing out of the principle of blockading the enterprise; orchestrated and carried out the most stunning military operation, in scale and scope and civilian casualty rate and technological leverage and speed and efficiency, ever yet seen on Earth; and then, availed of all the technology and manpower that won the war in three weeks, failed for month after month to find any of the alleged weapons of mass destruction, which should have surprised nobody because it was all a massive sham, but it was surprising that the occupying force wasn't dedicating itself from day one to planting evidence for retroactive justification of the war; and then, late in the game, decided that they'd better get evidence-planting, and so they constructed a piece of contraband so flimsy and so old and so ambiguous in its background that it would have been totally useless even as propaganda and a shameful blight upon the record of any covert operative who was trying to create fake evidence, and which was indeed agreed by Bush's own administration to be "not a smoking gun" --
...than that the war was fought on the basis of intelligence that was thought to be valid at the time, and the lack of WMD findings today is indicative of nothing but the inadequacy of that intelligence.
No barber of Occam, Moore.
Isn't it fascinating how the more ridiculous a conspiracy theory appears, the more proof it represents to those who believe in it of the conspiracy's depth?
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| Monday, June 30, 2003 |
10:54 - Hello again
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It's Monday already? Damn.
We're almost done with the move-out/move-in. Almost. It's the last day of the month today, which means we turn in the keys tonight, which means we have to have the last few things moved out by then, plus everything scrubbed down to a reasonable approximation of livability.
They're talking like today will be nowhere near as hot as it was over the weekend, just for us, just for the move, thank you very much, whoever's still giggling at us from behind a cloud over that one. Heaving huge boxes full of books in and out of pickup trucks and washing machines up and down stairs in 106-degree heat is fun! Yeah! Well, c'mon, actually it was, sorta. There's always that feeling of accomplishment, which is made marginally less satisfying as time goes on and you realize that you're moving from a 2500-square-foot house to a 1700-square-foot one, and you're going to have to divest yourself of a good one-third to one-half of your possessions just in order to be able to sidle into your room between the door and the towering, nodding colonnades of cardboard boxes.
All of which is made even more interesting by our bizarre decision to pick up Capri before moving, which meant he got to acclimatize himself to the old house, thinking that was his new home, for like a month-- at which point we started shuttling him back and forth to the new place for lack of a dogsitter, and he really doesn't like driving, I don't think. Oh, sure, he'll do it, but he'll be sulky and passive-aggressive about it, and he keeps falling over once he's in the back seat and the car starts lurching from street to street. So then he gets to this new place, full of the smells of new paint and new carpet and new other dogs in the neighborhood, and then he gets left alone for hours on end while we do more shuttle runs, each of which involves about an hour's turnaround-- so what's a dog to do for amusement but pee on the carpets? Hey, gotta work off all that stress somehow. So in the midst of so much else, I've got to do emergency Resolve treatments to keep these brand-new carpets from being ruined before we've even had a chance to put any furniture on them. (He's settling down now, though-- after we started slowing down the frantic pace. We're in the home stretch now, and I think he senses that.)
Oh, and there's no network at home now. After packing up my computer on Saturday and bringing it over, there's no more communication from me to the outside world from home for like another two to three weeks while they wait for the phone company to set up the T1. (Presumbly somewhere deep within the SBC offices they have one of those big crudely-painted "thermometer" signboards that keeps track of the levels of bribery necessary to get them to go out and do some given task; right now the red is just inching past the "You gotta be kidding me" level, with "Right as soon as we finish the World Championship Spitball Tournament" near in sight.) So I get no opportunity to do e-mail or blog or anything except at work, which means no outside communication on weekends at all. What'd I miss?
Katharine Hepburn died, I heard.
Somebody shot up a hotel in San Francisco, the "sideshows" in Oakland (which nobody on the news bothered to define, apparently assuming that everybody's watched 2 Fast, 2 Furious by now-- the police guy they interviewed talked like "We had reports of sideshow activity around 3rd and Lexington, and we responded and found that sideshow activity was indeed in evidence, and the sideshow activity had been in progress for some time"-- thank you, now what the %^#$ is it? Quit talking like Space Ghost describing sex!) are going unchecked because the police aren't funded to try to keep the rice-boys from doing doughnuts on people's lawns, and someone with a sword hacked up a grocery store in Irvine. Quick! Ban all swords! Think of the children!
I understand the Palestinians couldn't keep their "truce" for even a single day. Suck my butt, Palestinians.
iSight can be used to capture raw DV footage for use in iMovie, according to Damien and this thread. Also, those same ad-hoc networks that have already exploded into existence for iCal and (until someone went ahem iTunes Music Sharing are now popping up for iChat AV too. Now you can browse chatter lists by name and see who's open for audio or video sessions. I do believe network effect has a part to play here.
589 e-mail messages. Mostly spam and error bounces, I'm sure, but some are bound to be things I need to pay attention to, like for work. So that'll be it for now.
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| Wednesday, June 25, 2003 |
17:21 - If only they made cars out of bumper sticker glue
http://www.msnbc.com/news/931304.asp?0cm=c10
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I hope those BUSH LIED, PEOPLE DIED bumper stickers were made with that environmentally-friendly mucilage that lets you peel them off without damaging your car (a derivative, no doubt, of the non-freon-based Space Shuttle foam that falls off and destroys thermal tiles).
Eventually the left will come to understand that just because a cute slogan rhymes doesn't mean it's true. Somehow, however, it's not looking like they'll realize it in time for the 2004 elections.
Fortunately, they captured Baghdad Bob too, so we'll have plenty of alternate explanations in short order. Or are all these sudden successes just a little too convenient?
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16:12 - Does this mean they've gone mainstream?
http://www.sideshowtoy.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=rabbits&item=7901R&type=sto
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Calling all fans of Michel Gagné's Insanely Twisted Rabbits! Yeah, you know who you are.
Snerk. Heh. Gotta-- n-n-HAH! Gotta catch 'em all! Hee hee heeee.
(Too bad there's only the one. So far.)
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| Monday, June 23, 2003 |
16:18 - Total Journalist
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59261,00.html
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Sweet! An interview with the creators of Homestar Runner.
It's notable that today, Chris wore his The Cheat shirt, and I have on my Strong Bad one... talk about the target audience.
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08:27 - Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/tsnoteswwdc.html
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From Think Secret, which has pre-keynote photos like this one:
After Apple's accidental posting of Power Mac G5 specs to its Apple online store last week, the company emailed many of its employees a copy of their non-disclosure agreement (NDA). While Apple didn't specifically mention the G5 post, the email reminded employees of the agreement they signed when they were hired, in an effort to prevent leaks late in the weekend.
Sources confirmed that the PowerPC 970 CPU that is at the heart of Q37 -- the Power Mac G5 -- is code-named "Neo" within Apple.
Have I mentioned lately that I love Apple's code names?
More later, in all likelihood.
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| Friday, June 20, 2003 |
02:14 - All I want is a proper floppy copy
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Q: How do you make a boot floppy disk in Windows 2000 or later?
A: You don't! Bwa ha ha haaaaah! Puny mortal! Drop to your knees and kiss the toes of the Redmond Demon! Crawl back to your Windows 98 and use the SYS command, but Win2K shall not brook your pathetic desires!
Yes, I'm seriously pissed-off again, after spending another three days trying to get Windows 2000 to install. I never learn, I know. But it'd been some time since my last installation debacle, and somehow I got the damn-fool notion in my head that just because I hadn't had any bad Win2K installation experiences in the past few months meant not that I just hadn't tried to install it during that time, but that I must have been installing it numerous times without incident. Hoo-boy. No no no.
So I get the MSDN Win2K common-install disc from its keeper in the team; it has Pro, Server, and Advanced Server on it (I love the nomenclature; I suppose the new version's variants will be Windows Server 2003 Executive Edition, Windows Server 2003 Executive Special Limited Edition, and Windows Server 2003 Crown Royal Vestibule Pirouette Grand Marnier XPS Eddie Bauer Edition). I take it to the 3U rack-mount machine that Chris cannibalized from his stack; I install a Creative CD-ROM drive as the secondary slave. I stick it in the rack. I boot up: Linux. Happy. Well, not for long: in goes the CD.
Reboot; dink around with the BIOS; boot into CD. Windows 2000 Installation procedure! Let's install some drivers for a bazillion SCSI cards you don't have! I'll be doin' this for a while; go get a Diet Coke and play some ping-pong. Hey, look-- it's done! Yes, I'd like to install Windows 2000. Enter. Oh look, "unknown" disk formats. Funny how every other fdisk implementation knows how to identify partitions as Linux/EXT2FS or FreeBSD/UFS or NTFS or FART or FART32 or or FART32+LBA-XP+INT13 or whatever, but Windows' version just sniffily says that it's "Unknown". Ah well; delete it. ("Deleting the partition will cause the loss of all your data; press L to delete." L for Loss, I guess.) Delete the other partition too. Create a new one. Format the disk? Yeah, let's make it NTFS. F for Format. I'm learning my ABCs this way! Oh, and look-- it's done. Examining Drive C! I'm on the home stretch now! Here we--
Setup is unable to locate the Windows 2000 installation files on the CD-ROM.
Uh... what?
I said, Setup is unable to locate the Win--
Yeah, I heard you the first time. Um... let's try again! Enter. Hmm... nope, same error. Again? Nope... the CD-ROM drive light isn't even lighting up.
This is perplexing. Because, see, it's been running the Setup program from the CD-ROM. It's not like it suddenly can't access the CD (except for the fact that the access light isn't lighting up). It's like it's just stopped trying. Like Stimpy after his son Stinky ran away from home: I'on't care! Tried removing the CD, replacing it, wiping it off-- nothing. This is the MSDN disc, I might reiterate, from which we have installed countless Windows 2000 machines. None of which ever suffered from the Brian Touch, however.
The error screen helpfully suggested: "If you continue having problems, exit the Setup program [F3, whereas F8 was for accepting the EULA, and F11 is for turning the screen pink or opening your garage door or something] and copy the installation files to your hard disk." Oh-kay, I'll do that! I hit F3, I take out the CD, it reboots, and-- "NTLDR Not Found." Perfect.
Oh, but look: I have Win2K installation floppies, helpfully provided to me by the same person who gave me the MSDN disc! I pop one in and reboot. Wheee! SCSI drivers again! I'll get another Diet Coke; a whole six-pack this time, actually, since this is a floppy we're talking about, and it'll actually take more like half an hour to read in the contents of each of the four discs, those ten thousand all-important SCSI drivers.
Aha, at last we're done! Use that already-formatted NTFS partition. Examine that disk. Copy the install files from ... CD...
Setup is unable to locate the Windows 2000 installation files on the CD-ROM.
Oh joy. And no, these floppies do not provide me with anything so helpful as a DOS PROMPT either. So it's a good ten minutes of mingled swearing and gloomy monochrome Bergman-esque existentialism, before I go for the next step.
Which is, of course, a boot floppy. Which can't, of course, be created under Windows 2000 or later, because the SYS command has been helpfully removed. Ah, but Chris has a Win98 box! And I have a floppy disk! Together, we form... Boot-Floppy-Create-Man! Cue theme music! [floppy disk squeaks and grinds and churns for ten minutes] Ahh. Sweet beautiful AUTOEXEC.BAT. How I've missed you. And your buddy CONFIG.SYS; it's so good to see you again. How's EMM386.EXE? Oh? I'm sorry to hear that. Well, those kinds of relationships never really do work out, do they? Que será, será...
Boot me dis floppy, Mister Computator! Yay, Windows 98! I say, boot Windows 98 with that there newfangled CD-ROM support. Yup, look at that sucker load them CD-ROM drivers. All set up? Yup! Good ol' A:\> prompt. But wait... what's this? Your hard drive is formatted in some unholy non-Microsoft manner! I can't use this! You'll have to format it; I've copied some helpful tools to a RAM disk at C: for your convenience. Have a right nice day! Um... that's NTFS, you fool. Oh wait... wait. Right. NTFS probably didn't exist in 1998. Or if it did, it was at the other end of the Redmond campus, and nobody was going to admit to its existence in the grim laboratories of Microsoft's Dr. Mephisto. Look! I've created a four-assed filesystem! So it's back to the CD-ROM for me, to reformat the hard drive for FAT32.
Just for giggles, I try going through the whole install procedure after formatting, just to see if maybe Setup was having some kind of fit about not being able to copy files from the CD onto an NTFS disk; a long shot, and I thought at the time that it would have made a much better inevitable blog-rant ("Windows' Setup program formats your disk for NTFS, but then can't read it!"), but it was not to be. Setup is unable to locate the Windows 2000 installation files on the CD-ROM. Ah, that's better. Good boy.
Back to the Win98 boot disk; nice clean boot procedure, and a veritable smorgasbord of available drive letters to use. A: and its Siamese twin B:. C:, the hard drive. D:, the RAM disk with its Binford utility toolbox. E:, the CD-ROM. Lance:, the gay neighbor. I poke around in E: for a while. Lovely; there's an \ENGLISH\WIN2000 directory with three subdirs for Pro, Server, and Advanced Gifted Super-Achieving Honor-Student Server. But then there are three other top-level directories with three-letter names ending in "P", "S", and "A", so which one do I copy? Aaahh, who knows. First off, what command do I use to copy file trees in DOS?
Hmm.
COPY? Nnnnno... that's just for copying single files, it seems. There's reported to be a /R switch lurking about in the innards of super-hi-tech advanced versions of COPY, but that's not what this is We're talking 1998 technology here-- you think they'd invented recursive copying by then? Hey, wait-- I remember something called XCOPY! Is that there? Nnnnno. Okay, back to Chris' Win98 machine to copy it over. Back to the lab and try again. XCOPY.MOD not found. Huh? What's that, the theme music for XCOPY? Okay, copy that one off his machine too. (I love non-monolithic executables, don't you?) And.... pick a directory tree at random and start copying.
That machine is still copying as I type this. Or maybe it isn't, because I got fed up and realized that the whole exercise was ultimately going to be fruitless. So I cajoled the product manager guy into digging up a machine from somewhere else in the company that already had Win2K installed. And this he did. A supahfly 3GHz-ish Dell with 1024GB of QDR RAM. Or something like that. "This should be fast enough for anything you need," he says. Yeah, well, tell that to the machine, which, as though trying to put on a big show of being depressed and sulky and suicidal and giving a bad impression of its Evil Robot Masters, boots in about two minutes flat, and then gets past the boot phases and starts to log you in, which takes another whole three minutes before it draws in the icons. What the hell's it doing? Maybe it's "Applying security policy", or perhaps "Preparing network connections". Who the hell knows. It's not like it has any console messages or anything; just waiting. You can play with the mouse pointer while you wait. It's 3GHz! Look how fast it refreshes!
This story isn't going anywhere. The drama hasn't really finished, as Mr. Supahfly Dell can't run the software whose operation this whole exercise was undertaken in order to run, because our licensing is totally out of whack what with our never having run the software in question since early 1999, back before Windows 2000 was even a sparkle in Bill's left testicle. So we rooted around in the derelict old boxes under the lab benches until we found the old server box, which still was under the misguided assumption that it was authorized to run the console software, and (even more miraculously) booted. But then again, it was running Windows 98. So aside from having to reboot because it DETECTED A NEW MONITOR and having to reboot because we CHANGED THE IP ADDRESS and having to reboot because we PUT IN A FLOPPY DISK and having to reboot because we LOOKED AT IT FUNNY-- oh, and having to reboot all the other machines in the stack every time we wanted to switch the keyboard and mouse and video cables to a new box, because they're PS/2 cables and Windows totally freaks out if you disconnect PS/2 cables or try to swap them or anything and you don't happen to have a 19-port KVM switch-- everything's just hunky-dory now.
That's all. No screenfuls of ```````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````` this time, though. Gee, I was sure hoping to see that again. What a gyp.
Why is it that something like this happens to me every single time I try to install this turd of an OS? Why are so many other people in the world seemingly able to install it without incident? I mean, come on-- I wasn't even foolishly trying to upgrade the OS this time, as I was informed by several helpful people was such a retarded first-timer's mistake last time I tried it. No-- this was a fresh clean install. And still it mocks me. Still the Eye of Bill peers at me from the north. What does he want from me?!
I guess maybe some people just weren't meant to run Windows.
UPDATE: Ah. Grumph.
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| Thursday, June 19, 2003 |
17:32 - He asked for it
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=560222
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My favorite has to be this one, by far:
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13:37 - Noses 23% higher
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Since I'm borrowing Kris' truck for the week, while we use it for nightly shuttlings of large pieces of furniture from the old house to the new one (the carpet looks rockin', by the way, and the furniture matches it marvelously well-- I couldn't be more pleased), I've been studiously avoiding altering any of the ergonomic settings so that when I give it back it'll be just the same as when I got it. That means no adjusting the seat (though it makes my lower back hurt), no adjusting the mirror (I can raise myself on my prehensile butt and thus see at his 6'39" level), and no changing the volume on the radio.
This means NPR was on at a fairly low level today as I went and fetched lunch-- not low enough that I couldn't hear it, though, more's the pity.
On Talk of the Nation, as one might expect, the subject was the fact that Canada now all but allows gay marriage. Hip-hip-hooray! Good on 'em, I say. We can but hope that this is a trend that will eventually spread to all countries, the US included.
Well, not to hear these guests tell it. Not content to let well enough alone, one (from Canada-- I didn't get his name or credentials) spent the hour today examining all the myriad reasons why Canada is morally superior to the US, of which gay marriage is only the most recent evidence. According to him, the US is unlikely ever to reach that milestone, because, well, it's just too damned conservative down here.
The guest quoted all kinds of statistics, naturally. 10% of Canadians go to church regularly, as opposed to 50% in the US. 1/3 of Canadians consider religion to be important in their daily lives, compared to 2/3 of Americans. Toronto has 44% foreign-born residents, and 1/10 the crime rate of American cities of comparable size. Yes, yes; we've heard all this before, <cough>michaelmoore<cough>. I know, I know, we suck. Thank you for reminding us.
Of course there were callers from the US who were either slow, bewildered-sounding rubes who said they were happier now that they'd moved down into the States and live in Oklahoma, where it's more conservateeve and they don't have to worry about gay marriage 'cuz it's against Gawwd, or fluttery women from Lansing, Michigan who said that ever since Bush was (s)elected, she'd been looking at the northern border with longing. Because, she said, "the problem with America is that we don't follow the Constitution-- we can't seem to separate church and state! I mean, look at Canada-- it has free health care!" She actually said that. The host did ask her what that had to do with religion, and she laughed embarrassedly and made apologetic noises, but it's clear where her mental path really lay. If something goes wrong with your body, you can call the warranty fulfillment center and they'll send out an on-site technician to fix you right up, the bill paid happily by your friendly healthy neighbors; and of course that can't happen in a country that has religion.
But the guest had another statistic that really rather floored me: not only do Canadian poll respondents completely diverge from Americans on the question of whether "the father is the head of the household" (18% of Canadians compared to 49% of Americans, rising to something like 71% in the South), they also consider it important for the kids in a family to be treated as total equals, as early in life as possible. Not only are the father and mother in a family to be of equal stature, the kids are supposed to be egalitarian decision-makers too. Not a patriarchy, the guest said, but a heterarchy. Everybody is equal.
No mention was made in these statistics of whether the incomes of the various family members should have any correspondence to how much sway over the family individual members should hold. Never mind that the kids don't bring in any money; they're to be treated as equal to the adults, just as a stay-at-home wife or stay-at-home husband should be equal in influence to their breadwinning spouse. Never mind whether the kids have any life experience with which to justify whether they should be equal participants in the household like on some apartment-life sitcom.
The guest came back to this quite proudly a number of times, citing it as one of the major reasons why gay marriage is such a no-brainer in Canada. But to me, it's an indicator of something else entirely.
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09:22 - Oooh. How you say, ze OUCH.
http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters06-17-110548.asp?reg=EUROPE
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Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi:
"They missed a good opportunity to shut up," Berlusconi told reporters in response to French criticism of his decision not to meet Palestinian leaders during a recent trip to Israel.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said this week that Berlusconi had "not satisfied the European position" by holding talks only with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon during his June 9 visit to Jerusalem.
"I went (to Israel) as the prime minister of Italy. There's no way France can issue criticism over something that was the sole right and responsibility of the Italian prime minister," Berlusconi said, clearly bristling with irritation.
His choice of words in telling France to keep quiet precisely echoed comments made by French President Jacques Chirac earlier this year when he criticised east European leaders for their staunch backing of the U.S. position on Iraq.
The man may be under investigation for corruption, but he's still the leader of a major European nation-- and it seems to me that if major European leaders are going to start tossing barbs like this, and hold steaming grudges over French paternalistic sneering just like the Americans do, well-- might this be the beginning of the meltdown of the EU?
FRANCE: The Italian government has not satisfied the European position, and is acting in an irresponsible and unilateral manner, something we've come to expect of the Americans, but unbefitting of an enlightened European nation. Italy has missed a good oppor--
ITALY: France, you just missed an excellent opportunity to kiss my ass.
I understand Italy is beautiful this time of year.
Via Tim Blair.
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| Tuesday, June 17, 2003 |
17:38 - Movable Object Meets Irresistible Force
http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=3533&t=innovation
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Kris forwards me this tasty little book excerpt regarding the development of the Segway (then known as Ginger), and the fateful meeting in which Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs and other investors met with inventor Dean Kamen and discussed development and marketing plans. The lesson everyone learned was that you don't ask for Steve Jobs' input unless you expect to have the whole thing turned on its ass.
"Because I see a big problem here," said Jobs. "I was thinking about it all night. I couldn't sleep after Dean came over." There were notes scribbled on the palm of his hand. He explained his experience with the iMac, how there were four models now but he had launched with just one color to give his designers, salespeople, and the public an absolute focus. He had waited seven months to introduce the other models. Bezos and Doerr nodded as he spoke.
"You're sure your market is upscale consumers for transportation?" said Jobs.
"Yes, but we know that's a risk for us," said Tim, "because we could be perceived as a toy or a fad."
If they charged a few thousand dollars for the Metro and it was a hit, said Jobs, they could come out with the Pro later and charge double for industrial and military uses.
Tim's eyebrows shot up approvingly. He looked at Dean, whose face was a mask, so he turned elsewhere. "Mike?" he said, looking at Mike Ferry for a marketing opinion.
"It's a good point," said Mike, giving his usual noncommittal response.
"What does everyone think about the design?" asked Doerr, switching subjects.
"What do you think?" said Jobs to Tim. It was a challenge, not a question.
"I think it's coming along," said Tim, "though we expect—" "I think it sucks!" said Jobs.
Fascinating reading.
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| Friday, June 13, 2003 |
15:50 - Getting it into words
http://www.amcgltd.com/archives/002713.html#002713
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What with all the refocusing of the world's attention on Israel ever since 9/11-- distracted, it seems, only temporarily by Afghanistan and Iraq-- a lot of people are finding themselves trying to come up with the ideal words with which to express how they feel about Israel, whether on the "pro" side or otherwise.
For many years it's been terribly easy to ignore the macabre docu-drama of Israel & the Palestinians-- as the news reports still describe it, even the less biased ones, it's just lumped together into the rubber-glove hazmat zone of "The Middle East". They seem to be conspicuously avoiding even using the name of Israel. "A fresh wave of violence erupted today in the Middle East," says the top-of-the-hour news, as though you can never quite tell where these things are going to happen next-- whether tomorrow's bus explosion will occur in Cairo or next week's missile strike on terrorist leaders will take place in Kirkuk or next month's pizzeria bombing will happen in Yemen.
Such terminology, to me, smacks of the alarmingly common tendency among Westerners to just put it all on a shelf somewhere and forget about it. "It's all just one big mess," I hear over and over. "Both sides are totally obsessed with death and violence. We should just build a big wall around it and lob in a nuke. Kill 'em all-- Israelis and Palestinians alike." Don't get me wrong-- there was a time when I might have said the same thing. But to hear it now, it rocks me back on my heels. It's a deeply, deeply troubling thing for me to hear-- an almost wilfully vicious refusal to take sides, to declare one side "good" and the other side "evil". When the planes hit the towers that morning, it was a gore point in the cognitive streams of all the world, but particularly of Americans; some of us saw the images on TV of the Palestinians dancing giddily in the streets, and we said, "All right, all sympathy I had for them-- and it was considerable-- has now officially evaporated." And the hole they've been digging under the doghouse they're in with me has only gotten deeper since then.
But others took that opportunity to cynically recuse themselves from the whole argument. "It's all just a big intractable mess. They're all equally bad." As though by saying so, the speaker bought anonymity, and a low profile, and a ticket out of identification with the hated evil West. Don't identify with Americans or with Israel, see, and you'll get a pass when the next Islamic atrocity comes. Oh, sure, I know most people don't actually think in these terms. Not out loud, anyway. But I have to wonder: isn't that exactly what thought process got Auschwitz built? A refusal to call evil by its name, and a denial of the existence of moral poles, even in this world of catastrophe and atrocity and achievement and human kindness?
So a lot of us have been trying to decide how best to express which side of the issue we're on. Some, like Charles Johnson of LGF, prefer to chip away at the edifice of the Israeli/Palestinian moral landscape, piece by piece, until a rough-hewn but towering sculpture remains, the expression on its face ugly but unmistakable and unignorable. Others, however, have sought to create the perfect encapsulation of the situation in a few succinct paragraphs. Few have shown a more effective combination of effectiveness and succinctness as Lileks-- but that, of course, is his unique gift. Others have to go into more detail.
Like this guy: Scott of AMCGLTD.com.
I say these things to Americans in the hope they will understand. Understand that even today when Israelis say they're fighting for their existence they aren't kidding. Understand that the Palestinians are not the helpless victims they so often claim to be. Understand that it's not radical Jewish terrorists who blow themselves up in the name of Jaweh. Understand that someone saying they're not against Jews, they're against Zionists is like someone saying they're not against Americans, they're against the United States.
I say these things to Israelis in the hope they, too, will understand. Understand that we realize one culture in the Middle East helped found ours, while the other wants to destroy it. Understand that we know we only got a taste of what it's like to live in your shoes. Understand that because of this the most powerful country the world has ever seen is working with all its might to ensure your nightmares, now ours, remain nothing more than dark wisps left behind on children's pillows.
I say these things to Israel's enemies even though I know they will never understand. Never understand that by destroying two buildings they succeeded only in transforming an ambiguous friend into a staunch ally. Never understand that by singing the praises of human detonators they merely dig a deeper hole in which to bury their own culture. Never understand their religion is no longer a force to be reckoned with, ceased being one six centuries ago, and their traditions are what got them in this mess in the first place.
I say these things to everyone so they may all understand. I am just one man among an ocean of men, a sea of women, living in a country of our own making with our own blood and treasure. I look across half the world and find in a region as old as time itself only one small nation that looks like mine. Unique in that region, its government is of its people, by its people, and for its people, and I am willing to do whatever I can to ensure it does not perish from this earth. True, I am just one man, standing up for what I believe in.
But I do not stand alone.
"These things" to which he refers need to be read, particularly by those who seek to hide from the problem and avoid the risk of (gasp!) offending anybody by throwing up their hands and referring dismissively and cynically to carnage on schoolbuses or ice cream parlors, and calculated tactical strikes on key terror leaders and the bulldozing of their homes, as all part of some symmetrical cycle-of-violence somewhere out on the part of the map that says This Way Be Dragons-- as, simply, "violence in the Middle East".
It's more than that; I know it is. There's a time to take sides, and that time was several months ago at the latest. If taking the side that I'm choosing makes me a target for ridicule and bile, well, so be it-- my life is comfortable enough that I can stand a few slings and arrows. It'll be good for me. It'll remind me that on that September day, when those plumes of smoke told the TV audience that War Was Coming, I decided that I wasn't going to hide or run away from it or pretend it didn't concern me. I wasn't going to respond to the spectre of America revving up its war machine by looking for a way to weasel out of being involved. I decided at that point that, ideologically at the very least, I wanted to be a part of the war, because I believed-- suddenly, and very strongly-- in the side I was on.
There are those for whom the world has become a video game, or a long cynical TV drama, the kind that Makes You Think About Who The Good Guys Really Are. Such people are wont to find solace and validation in the juicily ironic image of a bloodstained American flag with swastikas instead of stars, because hey-- it's all insightful and stuff! It's got levels of meaning! It has to be truer than something as simplistic and stark as the plain old flag draped over Saddam's face. Only someone of this mindset can say "Hmm-- the Jews want us to remove The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Indymedia; surely that means it's something worth reading! What are they trying to hide?" while being unable to name Israel's current prime minister.
But as boring and cliché as it's become, I like the good ol' real world. It's amazing how many things snap into focus as soon as one commits to a moral stand. Suddenly history and the future truck at once into frame like that famous shot in Vertigo. I find myself saying things like, This is my planet, dammit-- and I refuse to let its bright future, full of freedom and reason and democracy and innovation and miracle upon human miracle, be stolen from it without a fight.
I run the risk, of course, of sounding like some kind of apocalyptic doomsayer, or worse, a florid swords-and-sorcery fantasy novel. But that's only because these issues we face today, I think, are too big to ignore. They're every bit as big as the world-changing clashes that we normally have to escape into fantasy to find. But they're here and they're real. And if dorky-sounding words are the best contribution I can make toward their ultimate successful resolution, then let the dorkage begin.
And just after I posted this, I went art-approving, and came across a couple of well-thought-out sentiments like "Ugh. All the stupid humans are letting thousands of forests and animals die every day because they're all too into a stupid war that never should've happened that killed innocent people who deserved to live", and "I'm just so tired of human stupidity. Pretty son I'll be driven off the deep end, give myself animatronic ears and tail and a new digestive sysytem, and live with wolves." Yeah, great idea. Let's kill each other for supremacy in the pack and a greater share of the raw meat; that's a lot more evolved.
Ah, to be young again.
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| Thursday, June 12, 2003 |
02:33 - Oh, the humanity
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0609_030609_tvbaghdadart.html
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See the hideous destruction of the merciless American onslaught on the innocent people of Iraq. Witness the indiscriminate bombing and destruction of infrastructure. Marvel at the slaying of civilians and the rape of local women. Behold the terror and outrage expressed by the Iraqis at their oppression under American military rule, where they pine for the halcyon days of Saddam and the benevolent plenty with which he blessed his sovereign nation's people.
The graffiti-marked pedestal bears a sign with the sculpture's title: NAJEEN, which means "survivor," and also happens to be the name of the group of young Iraqi artists who created the artwork.
"Freedom is not a gift from people with tanks," says sculptor Basim Hamad, a Najeen member and the driving force behind the new artwork.
Fardus Square, now also called Freedom Square, is in the city center. Traffic wheels around the square?unless protests clog the flow. The sidewalks teem with a minibazaar of currency exchange booths and men selling satellite telephone calls. The Paradise Hotel stands just off the square.
. . .
For the new plaster sculpture, 23 feet tall (7 meters), the Najeen created abstract figures of a mother, father, and child holding a crescent moon, symbol of Islam, around a sun, symbol of the Sumerian civilization. The Najeen dedicated the sculpture to "every person in Iraq and to freedom-loving people everywhere."
Once again, millions of people living within the borders of the US have less understanding of what it means to be free than do a people in a faraway land who have never been able to take such a luxury for granted.
Another image for the ages.
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| Wednesday, June 11, 2003 |
10:01 - It looks different in here somehow
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So there wasn't much in the way of blogging yesterday, and it's all to the good-- the painting is down to the crunch, and I only get like an hour of daylight after work each day in which to work. This lets me do some touch-ups and make some minor progress, and yes, there's such a thing as incandescent lighting here in this modern world; but you try lighting your work surface when your outlets are taped over and your fixtures are disconnected. Plus I can't do all the hard stuff on my own, which involve holding ladders while I crawl up into the 20-foot ceiling cracks and hope my edging tool doesn't smudge.
But it's all good, because here's one more reason why I think I'll like living at the new place:
With sights like this on cool summer evenings, with banks of fog spilling down over the Santa Cruz mountains right at my back, I don't have much cause for complaint.
On the way home, though, unfortunately Mike turned out to be totally right: the BBC was positively gleeful over Israel's helicopter attack on Rantisi. "This Israeli attack deals a heavy blow to the roadmap for peace," the anchor said in her smooth, oily BBC voice that sounds like the radio equivalent of black ice. "It's unclear just how the government of Ariel Sharon thought it could get away with an assassination attempt at this sensitive time." Sure enough, it's the poor innocent Palestinians who are working in good faith toward peace, and any forthcoming failure of the roadmap will be all the Israelis' fault for striking at a target of opportunity-- someone who both sides were under no illusions as to being a major player in the terror network-- and striking at him in such a way as to absolutely minimize casualties other than Rantisi himself, by comparison to which our dropping four bunker-busters on that restaurant that we were pretty sure Saddam was in was unforgivably brutal and indiscriminate. But never mind, because that kind of attack is just as bad as a mother raising her child with exhortations to become a shaheed, filling his head with visions of sugarplums and exploding Jews and translucent-skinned virgins in heaven, so that he grows up to strap on a bomb belt and board a school bus and incinerate a dozen schoolchildren. It's all the same thing, see. That whole region needs to be walled off and nuked. No moral people left in there whatsoever.
Also via Mike, an LGFer's comment:
The Palistinians would kill every Jew, but can't. The Jews could kill every Palistinian, but won't. This is what's called "morals."
Anyway, then there's this massive coding project I suddenly discovered last night that I had to complete or else. You know how that can be.
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| Monday, June 9, 2003 |
11:43 - Forhorklingads!
http://homestarrunner.com/sbemail76.html
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Hey, look: Strong Sad has an iPod.
Now all he needs is ears.
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| Friday, June 6, 2003 |
21:25 - Oh ho ho, very witty, Wilde
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So when I started my car this evening, NPR had on a discussion of some local issue or other, featuring interview-soundbites from some deep-voiced commentator whose name I didn't catch. I have no idea what the context was (the show was "The California Report"); but in discussing the various viewpoints on the issue and the proper airing of the opposing stances, he had the following cynical one-liner:
"It's been said that democracy is like two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
Ah hah. Cute. Very pithy. But let's finish the thought, shall we? How about when it's two sheep and a wolf voting on what to have for dinner?
Doesn't that more accurately describe the typical social issue these days?
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| Thursday, June 5, 2003 |
00:51 - Too easy...
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/06/GettingRooked.shtml
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My only reaction to this scoop covered by Den Beste, on the possibility that the reason we haven't found any WMDs so far is that Saddam kept trying to buy them from con-men who delivered him barrels of sand instead of the weapons he paid for, is a juvenile but irresistible one:
There's a great joke in here somewhere about "selling sand to Arabs".
I'll let someone else come up with the actual joke. But as the late, great Bill Hicks used to say, I'm just planting seeds, people... just planting seeds.
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14:30 - 'Scuse me while I kiss this peanut
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2885928
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Those darned pesky ripcords...
BERLIN (Reuters) - One of Germany's most controversial politicians, former deputy chancellor Juergen Moellemann, fell to his death Thursday in a parachute jump that police are investigating as a possible suicide.
His death came within hours of a search of his home in Muenster, western Germany, by prosecutors probing allegations he violated party funding rules. Also Thursday, the German parliament lifted his immunity from prosecution.
Moellemann's populist stunts -- he often parachuted into campaign events -- had helped propel him to the top of the liberal Free Democrat party, but he quit in March in disgrace over charges of anti-Semitism and irregular party funding.
Eyewitnesses at the jump near the western town of Marl said Moellemann, who had been a paratrooper in the German army, probably killed himself. "It was clear suicide," said an experienced parachutist who saw the fatal jump.
Poor old Hans Moellemann. Must have been the date with Selma that really did it.
And to think-- he was only 31 years old!
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| Wednesday, June 4, 2003 |
01:33 - Could it be...?
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030603/lf_nm/mideast_bomber_dc_1
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As heart-sickening as this story is, and as many maddening questions as it raises, there is one bright ray of hope: the fact that it's Reuters, and that it's concluding something like this:
Like many of the new generation of bombers, he has more in common with the hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States than with the stereotypical profile of poor, desperate young men with nothing to lose.
He is a father of eight, well educated with a middle-class background and has even taken the unusual step of letting his family in on his plans. "They are proud of me," he said.
They still can't bring themselves to say the word "terrorist", but this is as close as I've ever seen Reuters get to acknowledging that the idea is the same.
Not that it really means there's hope or anything. It's probably way too little, way too late.
Via LGF.
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14:07 - Offenders Anonymous
http://www.proche-orient.info/en_xjournal_pol_rep.php3?id_article=13445
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This almost makes me want to do postdoctorate work in linguistics or history or art, obtain a fellowship, and become a professor at this institution or some similar one.
Just so I can tell these students to go directly to hell, do not collect 200 francs.
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Brian Tiemann
