Saturday, July 29, 2006

Fitshaced

The Passion of the Drunk

Jesus, David Letterman and Jay Leno just got six months worth of material...and now there's a report detailing his barely-veiled Jew hatred.

Maybe he found a way to turn water into wine?

God, I hope the Sheriff doesn't hang Mel up on the cross to make an example out of him...

87 m.p.h in a 45 zone? While he was 50% above the legal limit? The judge will crucify him.

Dude, Road Warrior was a movie. Not an instructional video!

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Marburg Place


Look, if someone can get away with naming a development site MARBURG place...well, then I think even I can get into this marketing gig.

In case you missed the movies, books, and magazine scares about hemorragic fever in the 90s, the biggest baddie of them all is the Marburg virus, which can cause death within three days as the internal organs liquefy, leading to bleeding from every orifice on the body - even tear ducts.

Thankfully, this little girl isn't an actual little girl - she's a stock photo and doesn't have to worry about living in Marburg Place. But you can! Come home - to Marburg Place!

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Thursday, July 27, 2006

Both Barrels

Stephen Maines tells Microsoft what the rest of us have been saying for twenty years.

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Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Government Spending in Perspective

Make sure the poor people don't frivolously spend their relief money: Check.

Make sure the really really rich don't misspend the people's money: not so much.

This message in fiscal responsibility brought to you by Republicans. Republicans. Republicans.

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Saturday, July 22, 2006

Zune

Microsoft pre-announces this "iPod killer" a week before Apple's WWDC starts.

On a Friday afternoon no less, when the headlines are filled with reporting on three wars, a nutty grocery knifer, and a heat wave.

Now, given that the rest of the world (except for the stenographers at C|Net, who just rewrite press releases) understands that you always release bad news on a Friday afternoon (see also, Bush, George W.), and always pre-announce well in advance of your competitor (to diffuse the competitor's own news by inviting speculative comparison), well, what have you got?

You've got a music player that's going to have the style of a Microsoft keyboard, some bullet-point features, massive marketing resources, and the deepest pockets in the industry. Whether it works well or not - whether people find it compelling or not - we'll hear a lot about the Zune (not even worth making fun of the name) over the next few months.

And, perhaps most importantly, the Zune will be a massive money loser. Like the X-Box, it will succeed only because the giant piggy bank at Microsoft buys the ads, subsidizes the hemorragic production line, buys dinner for the gang at C|Net, and repeats this formula year after year until they have the iPod's market share. And then, they still won't stop. Unless it doesn't happen - and I don't think it will.

I mean, have you seen the pictures of this thing? It looks like the best of the 3rd and 4th generation iPod, combined in a lovely mustard-yellow anodized case. Barf. The comments at the Microsoft "Zune Insider" (boy, there's a pun waiting there somewhere) are a mixture of "check out my podcast" and "you guys are idiots".

What, are we going to start calling them "zunecasts" now? Dinna think so. Microsoft is a little too late to this party to do truly well, I'm afraid, and while the hole won't be as big as the X-Box's, it'll be another money whilpool in the once-tranquil sea of Windows and Office revenue. And if something happens to threaten either one of those revenue streams...well, Microsoft may have to start thinking about inventing products no one else has actually, you know, gotten to yet. And making them work well. Frankly, if it comes to that, I don't give them much chance-but such a scenario is a decade off at the earliest.

(Don't even get me started on Microsoft's plans to replace everyone's AAC files with Windows Media versions of the same tracks. It's not fair, and may be actionable in court - you don't see Sony buying DVD owners Blu-Ray new versions of their collections, do you? There's a good reason, and it's not because Sony is poor.)

When it finally hits the streets, C|Net will do a glowing review of the Zune while the New York Times struggles to find anything outstanding about it. Still, it'll sell a lot of copies and give the iPod some competition - which for all it's efforts, Creative hasn't been able to do with players that are probably better today than the Zune will be tomorrow.

Money makes the world go around, and money equals influence. That's the only reason the Zune will do well - if it does well - at all. Massive money from the Office and Windows ATMs, helping to flood the airways, billboards, and pop-ups of the world with the message that Microsoft's player might not be cool, but it is...something...

Well, I hope they've got something compelling up their sleeves. I don't know what Apple has up theirs, (and even if I did, I wouldn't say) but I can tell you this: Cupertino is going to be a very exciting place during the next three months.

Apple's going to give Microsoft a lesson in stolen thunder.

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Friday, July 21, 2006

Power Floutage

Things are going great in New Orleans a year later:

“I had to go somewhere else to sleep,” said Nicole Guinchard, a waitress who works a 60-hour week on two jobs. “It was a hotbox in here,” she said outside her house on Dauphine Street.

“The deal was, at first, it was every time it rained. Lately, it’s been for no reason at all,” said Linda Morreale, an owner of a neighborhood tavern, Bud Rip’s. Ms. Morreale has seen her customers slowly drift away: “Everybody sits around until they get kind of uncomfortable.”

There is sudden darkness, then the creeping invasion of the humidity outside.

Mr. Stephens, the contractor, detailed the stages: “You get hot. Your kids get irritable. They drive you crazy. It’s a whole big ordeal.” Not to mention, he said, the extra $400 he has had to spend to replace groceries lost to the failures.

“Every couple of days, the lights be going off,” said Samuel Breaux, a warehouseman in a neighborhood sewing factory. The big building goes dark, and the women stop sewing. “You can’t do too much of nothing when the power’s out.”

Entergy executives say the problem is a complicated mix of uncertainty over how many people to serve, power lines that remain down, and connections that are no longer as reliable. Before the storm, when the electricity blinked out for a moment — as it did even in normal times, during New Orleans’s frequent summer storms — the utility could immediately switch to alternate lines. That option is far less available now.

“We don’t have the same number of power lines,” said Rod West, an Entergy manager. Most of the 22 substations were flooded; Entergy estimates it will need $267 million just to fix the remaining damage.


$267 Million. We spend that much in Iraq before the sun gets overhead. We're busting our humps to get precision munitions to Isreal so they can kill more civilians, but power in New Orleans? Not so much. Maybe Louisiana should just elect Jeb Bush governor - that'd get shit fixed.

Nice to see where this government's priorities are - Entergy's bailout was denied by the Bush Administration - and what's going to happen this year?

When the hell is this country going to stand up and say "We've had enough!"

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Accountable

I guess we've moved from an era where the president is accountable for failure to one in which he is held accountable for nothing.

Don't ask me to cite examples for Bush's failures. It's easy enough to use Google: just search for "George W. Bush".

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Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Google Terrorist

Whoa! The entire U.S. Subsonic strategic bomber fleet (and the most capable bombers we have) are all located here!

All a terrorist would have to do is look up the XML source code on this page in Google Earth to find out where we're keeping all of our strategic bombers!

Oh, shit! Hoss and Google be trines to destroys de country!



B-52s
I hear they're a great band!

-93.6707639480546
32.50284736082494
0
892.8760546196684
-1.379602057189533e-10
0.04287538291932862

root://styleMaps#default+nicon=0x307+hicon=0x317

-93.6707639480546,32.50284736082494,0


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Stop Analyzing, and Start Seeing

Dammit, stuff like this makes me want to yell.

Not that it's bad - graphs can be a useful analytical tool.

But - fer fuck's sake - can we please resist the temptation to quantify every single goddamned thing we do and just look at it?

Shit, I thought that was what art was supposed to be about. Not much use in everything conforming to an "ideal" histogram, now is there?

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I'll bet that...

..this shit is really worrisome to the national security hawks.

Anyone with a good arm and some creative thinking could time this stuff well enough to take down an airliner with 200 people aboard and shut down a major Silicon Valley artery.

Shit, I guess I'm a terraist now.

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Yeah, that's me!

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Jawja

From these results, it looks to this progressive that even Georgia wingnuts are disgusted with Republican "leadership".

Check out the Jawja primaries.

Yes, the turnout for Democrat candidates was higher in the biggest race. 445k approx. votes to 395k approx. votes. Could Georgia end up with a (choke) Democrat governor?

It would seem the GOP is out of tricks, and that even the "orange" Republicans are staying away from the polls.

Uh. Oh.

update - with 96% reporting

democrat turnout for governor's race: 476,544
republican turnout for governor's race: 414,575

As Happy Gilmore says: "Someone's closer!"

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Cool Page of the Day

The California Independent Systems Operator's System Status Page

Actually, this is a pretty HOT page. My in-laws in Redding just watched their outside temps drop under 100 degrees - at 8:14 p.m.

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Billmon's Velvet Hammer

One of the top three writers in the blogosphere.*

Humble, too!

*Actual opinion.

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Answer the Question, Mr. Gonzales

“Why wasn’t O.P.R. given clearance as so many other lawyers in the Department of Justice were given clearance?” Mr. Specter asked.

Mr. Gonzales replied, “The president of the United States makes decisions about who is ultimately given access,” and he added that the president “makes the decision because this is such an important program.”


That's going to get you an "F" in debate class, Albie. Neither of those excuses is an answer to the question posed.

An answer in keeping with constitutional principles would be along the lines of:

"The O.P.R. was not given clearance because other intelligence agencies advised the president that commie infiltrators were trying to steal our precious bodily fluids.

Therefore, the justice department, under my direction, exercised authority to prevent this grave threat to national secur-it-tie, by obtaining warrants from the FISA court to surveil those parties. We then found that they were innocent of any wrongdoing. I have no idea why the preznit did what he did."


Notes for debate class: "Resolved: The United States Government of, by, and for Republicans is immoral and must be replaced."

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Monday, July 17, 2006

Slashdot's Myopia

Sometimes, nerds and geeks can't see past their keyboards. And it's a shame.

Yes, I hear we painted some schools in Iraq. Oh, and the power is now on for four hours per day instead of two and a half! Oil exports are, uh, down since Hussein. But I'm sure that after three and a half years, we'll get right on that. It's all the fault of the oil companies anyway.

Yes, there's a lot of good going on in Iraq! Lots of radio hosts have seen it themselves from the safety of hotel rooms in the green zone!

That should mollify the public, what with 38 deaths per day on average due to Sunni/Shia violence in the low-grade civil war we helped make possible.

You know, Rush Limbaugh is right - the whole reason Iraqis are killing each other is the media's reluctance to report the good news. And everything wrong with American politics is the fault of a few "radical lefty" bloggers. Maybe those who think there's a lot of good news in Iraq ought to fly over - in uniform or not - and report some good fucking news themselves. (Somehow I think the leading lights of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders (Malkin, Hewitt, Instapundit, AIRottweiler, LGF, etc.) won't be boarding an Emirates flight to Baghdad anytime soon.)

--

The only problem is that the extreme right wing of American politics has slowly inched closer to the mainstream, due to the cowed American "mainstream" media - who want to be "in the loop" more than they care about actually reporting the news.

Since the facts are biased toward reality, we might be in the middle of impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush and Richard Cheney if the news media actually did their job. Instead, they'd rather than talking about the latest missing white girl. Months of coverage about a murdered white 17-year-old last summer - and moments of coverage about the 14-year-old raped and murdered by American troops in Iraq last week.

But I'm sure she was a terrorist anyway, right? I mean, she was a nig......- I mean, Hadji. That's what our soldiers call Iraqis.

Luckily, hurricane season is coming, so CNN will have something to debate on the Shit-Your-Nation Room (With Leslie Blitzer) instead of paying attention to the constitutional crisis in progress.

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Sunday, July 16, 2006

First Impressions

There's something of a truism in the maxim that "the first impression is the strongest".

After some interviews this week, I've read as much in many web sites dedicated to helping job seekers make the best first impression. Luckily, my dad taught me how to dress well. I speak well. I write well. I think I make a good first impression.

Unfortunately, I'm not so good at listening to my own first impressions. When I started work in January at XYZ Imaging (two days after my wedding, as a special favor to the owner), I was repulsed by how dirty and in disrepair the place was in comparison to previous digital printing studios I'd visited or worked in. XYZ, located in a warehouse district near the San Jose airport, was a barn filled with too few employees, lots of dirt, tons of old, broken, disused equipment, and most of all, a spirit of disgusted frustration.

"It's a challenge", I thought.

I should have turned tail and run like hell.

Six months later, when I quit out of sheer frustration, I'd learned that there was a reason the place gave me the first impression it did; the owner, reluctant (and as I later learned, just unable) to invest in any new equipment, made the employees cynical about the prospect of doing much else than working from crisis to crisis. The ordering system, designed and implemented many years ago, was inflexibly based around the clockwork schedule and "done or not" nature of of film processing.

First impressions are often the strongest, and there are good reasons why - when it comes to people, places, and things - to give that first impression more weight when deciding whether to fish or cut bait.

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Friday, July 14, 2006

Achoogle

Google is antisocial?

Do Tell. I wonder how News.com discovered this little piece of insight?

Maybe it's because for all the rah-rah/blah-blah egalitarianism, anything that starts from the top in Silicon Valley is suspect.

The salary slaves who show up for work every day around 9 after driving an hour, then leave work feeling guilty at 8 p.m. wondering what their kids names are? They're the ones who drive this valley. Fer fuck's sake - you can't touch a house anywhere within 70 miles for less than 3/4 of a million dollars. It ain't the guys who can afford old jetliners who make things happen around here.

Does it surprise anyone that Google might all be built on a well-engineered but reliably shaky house of cards? Hell, anyone can come up with good ideas - and anyone can write software.

But Google is cool, right?

Google is very cool. Shit, they were the only ones hiring around here during 2002 and 2003. A job is very cool.

I think they're little more than just another dot-com - but carrying lessons and pacing. Google's like the nerd at the beer bash who admits a DUI several years later. These days, that nerd will get on a good drunk with everyone else, but stick around the office reading e-mail until sober has one "r".

--

Sure, the Google guys "get it" to a degree. Just like I "get it" that bringing an easy to use, lightweight, distributed load search engine to market is a good idea.

I have a name for Google's next product:

G'Duh! The Google Product Predictor!

By using G'Duh I know that they'll do something obvious in a roundabout, colorful and belatedly cool fashion.



Google has a lightweight, geek-friendly corporate interface. They hire cool folks and all their cool friends. They have a stock price that coincides with their new toys' cruising altitude - which means that most of their employees will be able to buy homes, even when interest rates climb another few basis points. But I don't think Google has it's fundamentals in order - and I think that's illustrated all too well by the founders' choice and handling of executive transport.

--

S.P. Jobs has it almost right - he apparently shouts down employees he doesn't agree with, but he knows their names - and contrary to popular belief, he doesn't fire them without good cause. He also has good friends like A.C. Markkula and Larry Ellison, who clearly know something about style, class and how to combine the two in an aircraft purchase. Larry and Sergey might take a lesson.

This hubris shows up in their choice of personal airframe.

Any dipshit...er anyone with an extra $30 million to throw away can toss it on a 767-200 in need of an FAA "C" check. Only the truly discriminating choose to shy away from the equivalent of a V8 Suburban with wings and a 10-gallon gas tank.

In the south, we used to call discriminating aircraft buyers "old money". To paraphrase John Houseman..."Old money multiplied dollars the old fashioned way...they earned it".

To put it in terms even Dell support employees can understand, one can safely assume that the wrinkle-infested, sour-faced inhabitants of the corporate skies understand the value of restraint. Google, the entity embodied by this aircraft, doesn't get it.

Fer chrissake - having a couch delivered to the office so you can test it's fitness for a 20-year-old twinjet in lieu of what sounds like a fancy screw-sling? I hope you hired a bunch of smart people to run your company, guys. Enjoy the proceeds.

--

This is the culture that has lead to Orkut's failure as a connection space. Hell, everyone in this valley has dealt with "teh richendfamis", whether at the Plumed Horse, or during a double-take while being passed by a license plate-free silver Mercedes on 280 South. They know they're better than you - the number on the back of their car is bigger - don't you see?

They're smart - they have the money to prove it! If you build a corral and invite only a bunch of purple people to it, it's no wonder that no brown or orange people show up. And that's why Orkut is going over like an Andrew Sullivan book-signing event in the Castro.

--
But hey - you're wondering about the Googleplane and it's shameless owners.

Given the same, ah, liquidity, I'd have gone for a BBJ, which is much more thrifty, and nearly as big for all practical purposes. Maybe it's the frugal Lionheart in me.

As an added benefit, the BBJ or Gulfstream 550 has the advantage of not being 20 years old, like the airframe the "Google bois" bought into. Those jets also have the advantage of not needing extensive, hangar-renting teardowns soon - because they're new and small - not big and old like the Googleplane.

(Did I mention that these guys didn't seem to bother to buy a 767 that could actually make it from the west coast to the U.K. or Europe? Their 767 as outfitted can only fly about 3900 miles, while later versions of the 767-200, -300 and -400 can easily fly over 7000 miles.)

The Googleplane seems more and more like a Hummer H1 that flies - with a hole in the gas tank. In keeping with the 767-200s 1981 heritage, I guess.

If you were Larry and Sergey, why not cut your worries and just borrow Steve's sweet little G5? At least get your own G5 jet at a fraction of the cost per operating hour of a first generation 767-200.

Maybe I'll blog more on that in a later post, but the hubris of buying an specific version of an airliner that was not so efficient to begin with, hiding it somewhere as if Q was putting a missile shield aft of the APU, and getting sued over decorating the whole mess with places to have sex...uh, relax... is starting to look like Google has an Achilles heel in the two Stanford-bred fellas who fell into a great idea.

Achoogle? Goochilles? Hubris? What do you think?

Yeah, and if you've gotten this far - I'm seriously jealous. I want a 777 with GE90-115s. Because if you're going to waste gas on a flying party barge, don't wuss out.

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Thursday, July 13, 2006

Best NYT Article in a while...

Drink Yer Wheat.

Out of touch line of the week:

"Regardless of how it sounds, wheat beer has brewski credentials. It is the quintessential summer quencher, just right for Nascar races and baseball games. "

Yeah, you let Bubba know that his "Heifer Vise" is ready at the bar. I'll drive you to the hospital.

NYT - out of touch sometimes, but they hit the high notes.

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Arlen's Gambit

Arlen's got teeth!

Not.

Mr. Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who has sharply questioned the propriety of the program since it was disclosed several months ago, said the White House had agreed to a bill that provides for the highly secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to “consider the program as a whole and to make a decision on it.”

The senator said the White House agreed to the review after weeks of arduous negotiations that concluded late Wednesday. “And the upshot of it is that there is a bill,” Mr. Specter said, emphasizing that President Bush had reserved the right to approve any changes.


This is the modern version of "or I shall taunt you a second time!". Really, now.

Arlen's committee is going to get to review the program...and Bush will still get the last say on anything they recommend. So basically, it's a waste of everyone's time. Bush won't bow to pressure. He has to be forced to do anything he doesn't want to do - kind of like a cat.

I'd feel bad about forcing my cat to do anything. Bush, not so much.

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Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Humor Impaired Wingnuts

Sent by my friend Darron and offered without comment, this wingnut seems to think that the Onion is a member of the reality-based community.

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Monday, July 10, 2006

The Righteous and the Wicked

In the midst of making a point about how democrats can position themselves against eh righteous blowhards of the right, poputonian over at Digby's Hullaballoo says:

But the losers in the corrupted game are the workers (voters), including honest entrepreneurs and innovators, who are left frustrated and anxious by a system that rewards cheaters. Everyone is being eaten alive by the sharks in the water. The endless cycle of mergers and acquisitions keeps the money flowing up the pyramid, where it is then siphoned off for personal gain by pyramid-squatting CEOs.

So if the Democrats need to be righteous about something, and want something to reclaim from the opposition, I would say to reclaim the free marketplace, which this administration has utterly corrupted and destroyed.


Good idea. I know lots of people who are pissed simply because they don't even know who their damned phone company is anymore. Or their cable provider. Or who to call when their computer barfs up a hard drive.

Let's change the American entrepreneurial dream from "I hope we do well enough for long enough to get bought" to "Let's do well enough to keep acquiring more customers".

I know one company that resisted the temptation to merge, which would have destroyed anything good they'd hoped to accomplish. And I know another company that's run with pride and excellence - the keys to getting and keeping customers.

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Bush Fire

If I'm not already in trouble with the NSA, I will be soon.

Terrorists are figuring it out.

NEW YORK - The Lebanese man accused of plotting to destroy and flood Hudson River train tunnels also discussed the possibility of setting wildfires in California to inflict harm on the U.S., a federal official said Monday.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said wildfires were "only part of their planning discussions. No steps were taken to carry it out."

The official also said that Assem Hammoud "raised" the possibility of using backpacks on New York subways to carry explosive devices and attack the transit system.

The possible fire plot and backpacks - first reported by Newsday and the Los Angeles Times - were among several new allegations to emerge in recent days about the 31-year-old Hammoud, who was arrested in Lebanon in April.


The same group of "terra-ists" plotting to blow up the Holland Tunnel/PATH trains, etc. apparently spoke of setting multiple wildfires in California in an effort to inflict the death of a thousand cuts on our great nation, rather than trying to cut off our head with the W.M.D.s they've never had.

(As an aside, what the hell ever happened with the Anthrax thing? I was in Washington that fall and it certainly seemed important at the time. It was certainly a great distraction from all the other things going on in the District at the time.)

Now getting back to our Al Qaida version of "California cooking", I've always thought it obvious that with very little effort, equipment or preparation, some nutcase could always have started a chain of devastating fires throughout California, overtaxing the state's pitifully neglected firefighting infrastructure. All you'd need are road flares and a car. The beauty is that road flares - get this - are in almost every car in California already. Hell, they're $.99 at Orchard Supply. You could destroy the state with your dresser change in road flares.

While wildfires might not be able to bring the state to it's knees, they could certainly go along way towards bankrupting it and terrifying the WATB "red state" inland conservatives of the Golden State. Massive wildfires could also destroy much of California's tourism industry by rendering places like Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Lake Tahoe, Shasta Lake, etc. into so many black stick jungles.

Even worse, places like Fresno, Bakersfield, Merced, Madera, the Sacramento River valley, and hundred of Sierra foothill towns would be devastated. The flat, grass-surrounded planned communities would all go up in smoke, destroying tens of thousands of badly-built KB Homes McMansions and turning a veritable army of angry cheeto-eaters out on the streets. Victor Davis Hanson might lose his hobby farm and his hobby ranch house. Thousands of wingnuts would see their ski boats, jetskis, and second SUVs turned into little more than puddles of plastic in the driveway.

(That's why us coastal liberal intelligentsia live on the coast, where there's ample water - and it's why we've already cut down all those harmful, flammable trees, and paved over the troublesome fields of native grasses.)

But the scary thing is, these terrorists were arrested for talking about planning these crimes. And that's just what I'm doing now - talking about someone planning crimes, and the feasibility of such crimes.

Does it make me a terrorist that I spoke with a very conservative friend on 9/12/2001 on the topic of this asymmetrical tactic? That can't qualify me as a terrorist, because my friend, the arch-conservative, started the conversation and I know he's not a terrorist. But we developed the idea through conversation and talked about it at length. thankfully, not over the telephone - or maybe we'd both be in Gitmo.

If it really is that easy to hurt this nation, and if we should really get used to living in such abject fear, waiting for the horror that a firestarter could inflict, then I give up.

But I don't think the threat of firestarter terrorists is all that real. I think that if someone had wanted to do this, they've have done it already. What's so tough about gassing up in Bakersfield and flicking a road flare out of the window in a late California fall every ten miles? Surely, in a state of 30 million people (and growing) the Al Qaida infiltrators that exist among us (at least according to wingnuts) should have hatched and developed that plot long ago. Why haven't they?

Maybe they haven't because when it comes down to it, these folks are just as stupid as the front-liners in the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, Wingnut corps. They are, by and large, governed by the same urge for self-preservation we all are.

Or maybe - just maybe - there is no invisible army of Al Quaida waiting to take us out, as so many conservadroids seem to think. Maybe there's no compelling reason to shed our liberties and speech rights, to give up the chance of a deficit-free future, to regret the massive loss of life in Iraq sold on a bunch of lies.

Maybe - just maybe - the cowboy conservatives who have driven our country into a mud-slick ditch of fear and deceit are the ones who are the real terrorists. The ones who ply voters with fear when there's no terrorist even willing to hustle a bunch of road flares in order to destroy California.

I wonder what my conservative friends in the tinder-dry parts of wooded, rural California think of that?

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Copyright

I've had some copyright arguments with nutcases who appropriated my work before, so it's nice to see something like this.

Glad to see Gilliard posting it - this isn't just good from the "God's self-annointed are wrong again" angle, but it's a reaffirmation of the sanctity of copyright.

As a reminder to readers, copyright is conferred upon creation of any work - from the most fleeting snapshot to your new 800-page novel. You do not have to declare, register or otherwise claim copyright in order to receive it if you created the work on your own, outside of any prior agreement to relinquish copyright to someone else (this means a software developer can't copyright code they create for a company that copyrights work for hire or work created with their equipment). You do not have to enforce copyright. However, registering your work with the Office of Copyright formalizes the copyright of your work and makes it far easier to pursue damages if your work is infringed.

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The Salt of the Earth

Looks like California's "red state" heartland students are displaying the values that us coastal liberals just don't have.

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Sunday, July 09, 2006

Sunday Night Enron Empathy post

Bonnie Behrend, a former CNBC anchor who lives in Aspen, arrived at the church to pay her respects but was turned away by security guards.

"I know a lot of people say he's one of the worst criminals on the planet, but he's still a father. He's still a grandfather," she said. "Regardless of what happened, what he did or didn't do, he's still a human being and a Christian."


Uh, Bonnie. Wasn't it your job once to ask him the hard questions without giving quarter? I mean, who the heck cares how nice he was to his family when he ruined thousands of families in Texas and elsewhere?

You must accept that Lay was responsible as CEO; if he wasn't, then he wasn't in charge. If he was in charge, then he was culpable.

Bonnie, Ken Lay presided over the ruin of thousands of peoples' 401k, ESPP, and other investment accounts.

Being a Christian does not make you infallible, only forgiven. That's what I was taught, and I'll bet it's what you were taught, too, Bonnie.

Being a sinner doesn't even make you average. It makes you a sinner. Last time I checked, Jesus wasn't a mogul or a CEO, and he really didn't seem to like those kind of people very much, no matter what they said. See also: The Beatitudes.

Just like Ralph Derrickson and "Tiny" Tim Dreisbach, Ken Lay was not qualified or ready for his job; he was merely elevated to a place where he had wildly exceeded the Peter Principle. Shareholders should have revoked his pay, benefits, and payoffs well before Enron hit the shitter.

(I liked the part where Ralph Derrickson told his employees to "work smarter, not harder" and a week later told them all they'd have to take a week's severance whether they'd worked fifteen years or two weeks.)

Yeah, you bet I'm still angry about the way Metricom went under - and in no small part because it was much like Enron in it's inflated self-worth and exaggerated capitol potential. Not since the Macintosh have marketing people screwed up a product so well-suited to it's market. Not since the Space Shuttle has something been so over designed and proprietary. Not since Rome has any ruler been so isolated from the truth.

Thanks to SOX, we'll have, like, a week's warning next time.

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You know what's wrong with our press?

This is what's wrong with my press. Your press. Our press. You know - the people we trade freedoms in order to secure information about our government and world:

Reading TVNewser, says CNN's Miles O'Brien, "makes me feel like I'm in the middle of a cocktail party of all people who know what's going on in my business. We're all kind of chewing the fat, saying, 'Oh, no, I think this is true' and someone else saying, 'No, no, this is true.' "


Stop going to cocktail parties and report the news. How about that?

And if your sources don't want love, ignore them and their stories, and everything about them. That's the way it's supposed to work. Read a John Sanford "Prey" novel sometime for a tutorial about how the press and government can maintain an adversarial, if beneficial relationship.

Oddly, none of Sanford's scenarios involve cocktail parties, Miles. But thanks for reinforcing the stereotype that many of us thought was farcical - you've impressed the severity of the press' problem on us clearly, unlike much of what you report on.

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Yosemite at Night


Exposure made February 7, 1998 under a full moon and fresh snowfall in Yosemite Valley. T-Max 100 (duh), five minutes wide open at ƒ2.8 with a crappy minolta MC 28mm lens on a Minolta X9.

You don't need fancy equipment to get good results.

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Nagin

I despise Nagin. As a former New Orleans resident, he's worse than even "MMM" Mayor Marc Morial, whose laissez-faire method of city government let rampant corruption become institutionalized, and who seemed to have an excuse for every misstep, but never a solution. Morial presided over the police scandals (that became public) and were covered on shows such as "America's Least Wanted" with troy McClure.

The rising tide of the mid and late 90s boom that boosted so many American city and town coffers provided New Orleans with...not much at all. A couple of highway projects on I-10 in Metairie, a foundering land-based casino (and aesthetic abortion), the absolute worst poverty and crime you can imagine, and what's worse - the meteoric rise in the cost of higher education meant that the former middle-class commuter schools like Loyola were off limits.

The city's middle-class chasm cracked and yawned wide pretty quickly as educated students fled the area soon after graduation. Hell, I was one of them.

Through all this, the city remained optimistically fatalistic. That's the only way I can describe the attitude of New Orleans and it's people. "Nobody gives a shit, but it might get better. Probably not, though." The city bet everything on tourism and, for lack of a better way of putting it, mortgaged it's future against the willingness of the American public to "get all Bacchanalian" once in a while on the company expense account. Why would one of the most important port cities in the U.S. do something so stupid?

1. With a hearty push from the World's Fair in 1984, New Orleans started to rely more and more on the kindness of strangers - tourists - for it's bread and butter. A risky strategy in the best of times, it was successful because of the city's wealth of feel-good/act bad attractions and reputation.

2. Infrastructure in the Crescent City is incredibly laughable. For a place that manages to transship, cross ship, and pass-through more cargo than all but three other ports in the world, (tonnage) New Orleans managed to hold on to precious little money, and even fewer jobs.

3. In the 90s, neighborhood-led beautification projects, major sources of civic pride in most cities, were left up to private citizens alone. In places like the Tremé and Marigny, upper-middle class landlords restored, rebuilt, and with varying degrees of success, ran drug dealers deeper into the more rotten neighborhoods beyond - with no support from the Mayor or Police chief. One owner in the Treme I'm familiar with started by renovating his home, renting out two bedrooms, moving into the place next door, and then gutting and renovating it. He'd then rent out to middle-class folks, moving on to the next house. He'd gotten through two full city blocks like this, creating decent rental apartments and gardens out of a blighted area.

Despite his productive nature, how much more could have been accomplished if Morial had given a shit about the city's majority population?

Mitch may have been a "legacy" candidate, but at least he was a leader. Nagin uses the same "I'm one of you because, hey - look at my skin" crap to get votes. As a Louisianian involved in many political races, I can say with no small degree of certainty that it's a tactic that is sadly effective.

I know from talking to several people still there that New Orleans is essentially cored; it has lost the veneer of optimism that was a hallmark of the city's middle class. All that is left is the despair of the very poor majority and the hardened attitudes of the city's very rich sliver of population. Two sides, each giving each other a hearty "fuck you" over every single issue by stymieing each other's self-indulgent efforts.

Well, darn* you all, rich and poor. New Orleans could be a symbol of where this country is going if we're not careful. An evaporating middle class and declining average education (despite the many universities in N.O. many kids leave the state after graduating...brain drain) combined with a disaster has left this nearly 300-year-old city a shell of anything it's ever been.

If I move back there, I want to change these things. I want to work to keep the smart people in Louisiana. I want to work to bring smart people in. Louisiana was gifted by borders and geography with some of the richest assets of any state in the union, yet it's one of the poorest. People go to good, big schools, then leave the state for the east coast or California - or Texas, which I consider the boring space between the "ears" of Louisiana and New Mexico.

Ahhh. More on this later. I'm frustrated. Go read this good post, via Atrios, from Nim at The Ham Hock of Liberty.

*fuck

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Saturday, July 08, 2006

Mistakes?

Lindsay asked me to expand on a comment I left at her blog. To wit:

Working in fine art (and with aspiring fine art photographers) over the past several years has shown me that for the most part, it's the same fucking slot canyons, the same goddamn pictures from Tunnelview, and the same amateurish mistakes made by people who can afford anything except the time needed to slow down.


What do I mean by "the same amateurish mistakes" here?

Many photographers, caught up in the excitement of the hobby, go all out. They spend a lot of money on gear, buy all the toys advertised in Outdoor Photographer, and end up trying to kill a gnat with a shotgun. (It's a good thing Dick Cheney isn't a photographer.)

An example:

A photographer I had a chance to speak with recently made a picture in Yosemite right after a snowfall. Very decent composition, although I don't do those kinds of critiques. The problem was, he'd bought a new wiz-bang filter because it'd make his photos "better".

What did he mean by better? This new filter, a neutral-density graduated filter, is designed to hold back light from the lens in one area - sort of like sunglasses for the bright part of a scene, to help bring the exposure within the latitude of the film or sensor. Our poor example photographer was frustrated that the filter "didn't work". The problem wasn't the filter at all.

I told him to buy a new alarm clock and to put the filter on eBay.

The only "problem" with the picture was that it was looking east on a clear day, from inside a shadowy area, towards El Capitan... at about 10:00 a.m. (This southerly-facing granite face reflects light brilliantly during the winter months.) This was a slide film exposure, and not only were the shadows completely blocked (black), but the entire face of El Capitain was a rock-shaped area of clear film. No texture or detail.

Waking up to go make the picture at 5:30 a.m. would have done more for this photograph than all the photo equipment in the world.

I explained this carefully and cogently. And yet, our example photographer persisted in asking what he could buy to "keep it from happening next time". I told him I couldn't suggest any equipment that would help.

That's an amateur's mistake, and our example photographer will likely repeat it again and again, as he has in the past. When your bank account can handle it, it's always easier to try to buy your way to photographic nirvana.

If you slow down to examine the variables, it's never equipment that makes the incredible photograph - it's the photographer and what they've learned. Examine your failures more closely than your successes. (Film was better for this than digital, depending on your viewpoint; you can't erase film and start over...if you fuck up, you'll be embarrassed when you pick your work up at the lab, knowing that the film monkeys have already had a snicker on at your mistake.)

I've been lucky enough to have several great friends and teachers, including Darron, Rich, Bill, the other Bill, Charlie, Mark, and more than I can name here. But I think Darron and Rich were really the ones who knocked it into my head that photography is work. If you aren't prepared to put a lot of work into it and to listen to those who are already quite good, it will be a frustrating and expensive pursuit.

Sit back and take your time, and photography becomes about beauty, joy, and self-expression - or whatever emotions you wish to express with this most modern art form.

I plan on updating this post later...gotta go get ready for the Nine Inch Nails concert.

(iTunes...You Be Illin', Run-D.M.C., 1989)

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More on Digital...

From yesterday:

Enlargement requires absolute darkness, open trays of chemistry, and tons of patience. Digital requires tons of money, and tons of patience.

I'll write more about these ideas tomorrow.


Actually, digital requires tons of money, tons of patience, and tons of learning. Re-learning in most cases - because while digital is bringing many new photographers into the fold, it's also challenging a much larger group - existing photographers - to relearn everything about how images are captured and made into prints.

Let me say something about printing, first. Printing, used to refer to digital images, is not the physical act of choosing the "Print..." command and letting your printer make a hard copy - it is the process of making adjustments to the image to get the tonality, color, and mood that you're looking for. In the darkroom, these adjustments were made irrevocably every time you made a test print on paper - on the computer, you're not using paper, but the process is analogous.Hence, what I call "Capitol P Printing".

This relearning process is proving to pretty painful, if the past six years have been any guide. As a technical writer, I normally don't make any assumptions about what people know before I write for (or speak in front of) them. Still, my first couple of workshop experiences were eye-openers. Some people knew what dodging was, but not how to do it on the computer. Some people knew hoe to selectively lighten a section of an image, but were lost on the word "dodging".

I can provide many more examples - but it's clear that digital has opened a rift between those who knew before, and those who know how now. Sadly, this ends up making a lot of people frustrated, and it creates a lot of colorful trash that doesn't rise to the level of a drugstore photo printer, much less fine art.

More in another entry. Post some comments for chrissake.

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What the hell are they up to, anyway?

Ally Told Bush Spying Projects Might Be Illegal


By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE
Published: July 9, 2006
WASHINGTON, July 8 — In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.

The letter from Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did not specify the intelligence activities that he believed had been hidden from Congress.

But Mr. Hoekstra, who was briefed on and supported the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and the Treasury Department's tracking of international banking transactions, clearly was referring to programs that have not been publicly revealed.


Hoekstra: "Look you little tinpot. We gave you a blank check, and you pickpocketed us. Own up, you little shit."

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commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

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All you need to know about...

...the tax revenue jump from the rich and corporations.

The run-up in taxes looks good because the past five years looked so bad. Revenues are up, but they have lagged well behind economic growth.

Yes, that's right. The Bush tax cuts for the already well-off were so wildly successful, that those taxpayers are now super insanely rich and hence are paying a bit more in taxes. Give 'till it hurts, rich folks!

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Friday, July 07, 2006

Where's Photography Going, Anyway?

My friend T-, another photographer, agrees that what we've witnessed together over the past nine years is a momentous time in Photography. Less than 150 years after the art form of photography was invented, the very method by which it exists has been completely changed. We put a whole new capture medium behind the lens of most cameras sold in this country in less than ten years. (Imagine what we could do if market forces weren't centered on big, fast SUVs!)

I don't think it's as big a deal as most people make it, though. The digital shift changed the process of committing a moment, but digital hasn't really afforded us everyday images we couldn't have made otherwise. there are no x-ray digital cameras in common use, and there are no inexpensive cameras that can shoot in truly low light (like a starry night).

If anything, we've finally reached parity with film. I'm not going to embark on a film/digital debate - I am squarely in the "digital is good" camp, but film is extremely durable material compared to the memory chip on a camera - try immersing each one in vinegar for an hour, washing them off, and trying to make an image from each - the film will last - the card....probably not. There are many other examples of this durability...but film is chemical, after all. Enlargement requires absolute darkness, open trays of chemistry, and tons of patience. Digital requires tons of money, and tons of patience.

I'll write more about these ideas tomorrow.

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I have returned.

OK, they talked me into it. I'll try to update things here more often. After all, there's so much to talk about.

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