A Simple Plan

I miss Dad sometimes.

2007-06-05T01:57:00.001-07:00

I miss dad a lot. Every single goddamned day. Every minute. I miss him for all the time we didn't get to hang out. I miss him during the camping trips where I wished I could ask him what to do.

I miss dad because I'm embarrassed that sometimes, I, the First Class Scout, have no idea how to tie something.

Dad was the victim of an AVM three weeks after our wedding, in February 2006.

Dad has recovered to the best of his ability so far; he has good days and better days, which is a blessing - he was home alone when his event occurred. I couldn't ask for more, but I have wished for it.

Love you, Dad.

Photograph by Terrance Reimer.

Cluelessness Aplenty

2007-06-04T21:30:00.000-07:00

Boy, the folks at News.com really have outdone themselves this time.

In an article about the iPhone's solidified feature set, supposedly revealed by the three :30 commercials aired Sunday night, News.com's Kent German dissects some things we apparently didn't know about Apple's new mobile phone.

Be patient; there's a lot of crap to wade through here. From the article...

Let you fingers do the walking:....On the other hand, we're unclear if locking the iPhone again then turns off the phone and data connectivity. Yes, iPods have always lacked a dedicated power button but this will be a new thing for anyone who doesn't use a Treo. Also, it looks like the Talk and End buttons only show up when you place or receive a call.

Nevermind that Jobs demonstrated all of this functionality on the still available MacWorld Keynote - it seems pretty sure that Apple will have the ATT Wireless folks do a quick demo. But if watching all 90 minutes of the Keynote is too much work for German, we can understand - he works at C|Net, the Fox News of Tech Journalism.

Making calls: After placing a call, you'll have a static onscreen menu for a variety of commands, including mute, hold, speaker (nice!), phone book access, keypad, and add call. .....

Voice mail: Much has been made over the iPhone's visual voice mail that will allow you to choose from a list and go directly to the voice mail you want to hear. It all looks quite nifty, and considering it's the first such feature, it should be one aspect of the iPhone that will be worth its hype.

Wow. German watched the commercials and summarized them. Did he go to the New York Times Judith Miller School of Journalism?

Texting: Like many smart phones, the iPhone will display text conversations in their entirety rather than displaying messages individually. We're not sure if it will support instant messaging, though.

Oooops. I guess he didn't watch the keynote. Jobs clearly demonstrates using an AOL IM and Cingular account to IM other users.

More on mapping: Thankfully, Google Maps are integrated as part of the iPhone. That's a huge step above many cell phones that treat Google Maps like a troublesome third-party application. What's more, you'll also get the satellite view of an area. For map geeks like me, that might be the phone's coolest feature of them all.

Boy, 90 minutes of research could have saved German a lot of embarrassment. He missed the part where Steve talks about using the Google Maps API to create a rich, unique client on the iPhone instead of the normal browser-bound Maps interface.

Did German think those animated red pins came from outer space?

He also forgot to mention PDF services on the iPhone. And the Yahoo-provided push e-mail - like Blackberry e-mail services, but without the expensive Exchange server. And he forgot a few other things, too. Split pane view e-mail, visual voicemail, weather widgets, and Apple's pledge to allow third-party development on the iPhone.

Oh - and the satellite photos on the maps. And the rich HTML e-mail on the phone. And OS X. Three sensors to simplify usage.

Still other things we know, some of which you've heard already:

Yeah...we knew this stuff already. Because we watched the keynote in January.

Nimrod.

Geek of the Week

2007-06-04T17:18:00.000-07:00

This You Tube" contributor made his (her?) own gas turbine.

Remember 50 years ago, when only whole countries could muster this kind of technology?

A picture of Steve Jobs' Jet, N2N

2007-06-04T15:33:00.000-07:00

All Things D:5 - Jobs and Gates Podcast

2007-06-04T15:17:00.000-07:00

Video.

Audio.

I really think that as grizzled old technology veterans, we're gonna look back on this as the falling of the Berlin wall after 1997's Microsoft-Apple Galsnost.

I've heard...

2006-11-15T15:06:00.000-08:00

That Microsoft is working on a Zune phone that will allow you to record something and send it to someone else with a Zune phone. But they'll only be able to listen to it for three days unless you pay Universal Music Group a dollar.

This new product will be called the "Zone". Microsoft's marketing message will be "Welcome to the Zone".

This "record and recall" feature should be added to the Zune within a year, but look for C|Net to buck the trend and to annoint the "Zone" it an "iPhone killer" for the next six months.

Also, the Zone is slated to be compatible with Windows XP SR2 and Windows Vista only.

Retrospect music spending

2006-09-10T23:50:00.000-07:00

It's a little hard to believe, but I've spent upwards of $700.00 over the four-point-five years ITunes has been around. All of it legit - and about 347% higher than my previous music buying habits. I'd say that Steve has something going on.

Too bad he's the largest Disney shareholder and he apparently couldn't manage to weigh in on the bullshit drama that ABC foisted on everyone tonight.

I don't regret any iTunes tracks I bought up until a few days ago. Do you? And how much have you spent since buying music appeared online?

(latest - Apparently, this counterculture maniac thinks everyone should get "stoned", whatever that means.)

Moving

2006-09-07T06:26:00.000-07:00

We just moved to Baton Rouge. More to come.

Another Messed Up Charge Slip

2006-08-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

Gawdammmit! My bank is always making mistakes. Bank of This Continent, if you know who I mean.

CHECKCARD GEORGE BUSH INT'L HOUSTON TX DEBIT ON 08/03/2006 - $12.60

My letter follows:

Dear Gyant Bank:

I'd like to protest the charge of $12.60 against my Visa™ card, number xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx, expiration date xx/yy.

Now, I'll admit - I was mistaken in purchasing two plastic-bottled (nice touch!) Bud Lite™ beers. After many years of beer supression, I was looking forward to the free-thinking atmosphere of the Uniter "Beer States" of America! Whoooooooo!

Those beers appeared enticingly cold in the cooler. In fact, I was almost sure that I could see delicious beads of condensation against the smooth surface of the bottle. The beer almost looked as if it was trying to burst out - like it wanted freedom or something. (My stomach growled about that cruel bottle - holding that beer against it's will!)

I asked a friend of mine to touch the beer to verify it's coldness, but he couldn't - he told me that someone who used to work at the beer booth last year said it should be cold.

Hrummph. Well, if that's good enough for George Bush Intercontinent airport, it's good enough for me! I trust that the coolers'd be kept "kool" in a place like GHWBIA!

I sent my hard-earned money into the breach with the anticipation that it would be met with the chilled reception that only an "I-scold" (ha-ha, that's what my wifey calls 'em!) Bud can deliver!

I was especially excited because this all happened in George Bush Intercontinent Airport - and I was on my way to Baton Rouge - (the overcrowded castle next door to the shithouse as my Republican friends call it).

In other words, what a Bush promises, it delivers, and I knew that in this temple of beer, auntie-terrerism and precision flight, I couldn't go wrong!

Now, I know that in today's corporate climate of belt-tightening, I might be asked to sacrifice as a citizen. To pay more. To expect less. For the good of the country.

I stand behind this directive! Yes, sir!

But, sir, there is only so far any citizen can go on a regular basis. This beer was as warm as...well, I don't mean to be rude (and if y'rn a woman, skip to the next paragraph!) but that beer was as warm as...well, as Jesus said: "the path of an ass in the heat of July"*.

I found out from the Oriental woman running the counter (is she a terraist?) that the beer is "sprayed" to make it look all frosty and shit.

To add insultation to injuriousness, I paid too much for beer in the airport last time I was there, and I was surprised to find that the beer was even more expensive today - despite our conquerisquation of the rice and hop fields in Afghanistan.

Fox News (they've got a store in the Houston Airport!) said that Afghanistan was going to plow under the poppies for the "stoppies" - in other words, grains or other crops that would "stoppie" the drug trade. I want to help - but not if our government is going to let expensive Afghani rice and grain into our beers. It is time this practice stopped.

You'd think that those people have better things to do since we liberated them from the Tally-Man - but no - they just grouse an shoot at the brave Americans we send over there to fight.! It isn't like grain is hard to grow.**

(Aw, hell, we have better things to do - my wife has to spend hours on the phone with our investment counselors, trying to figure out what to do with all the money we made off of Enron in 2000!)

Back to business, what exactly are we fighting for, if not freedom? And does not freedom mean that OneClass members get beer on the cheap in the ass-hot terminals at GHWBIA? I'm disappointed. Therein lies the problem, and my complaint.

Since I was in the George H.W. Bush Airport, I proclaim my right to have the American people pay for my mistakes over the next twelve years. (Please submit a form 1099-DMBASS to the I.R.S. (not the record company!), and submit a credit to Capitol One against the above-mentioned account for $12.60.)

Thanks!

An American who can count. (and 2-3 Billion a week in Iraq is a lot to keep up with)

*Not an actual Jesus Quote. For actual Jesus Quotes, click here. Jesus quotes may be substituted, and not quoth by the actual carpenter, who may not actually be from Nazareth, Jerusalem, or for that matter, in this corporeal world. But hey - believe what you want. It might be Jesus on the other end. You never know.

**This entire post is a fucking joke. If you were on a phone, I'd say "hang up". If you haven't figured it out yet...pull the power plug outta your computer, drink a bottle of beer, and head for the nearest coast.

Microcowards

2006-08-02T15:40:00.000-07:00

Microsoft should just bite the bullet and do what worked so well for Apple - let go of their entire legacy codebase. Seriously.

My advice to Microsoft is to buy or develop a new operating system with a provision for Windows compatibility - but the compatibility layer should be partitioned from the new OS and deprecated quickly.

Sure - put a few people on a team to make sure that legacy codebae will run in the new OS, but kill that insanely complex and increasingly bloated monster now, so we can all move forward.

Win32 and the NT Kernel are suffocating security, innovation, and style on the Wintel platform - which could develop into the MacTel platform more easily than I think people will admit at this point.

Fitshaced

2006-07-29T10:55:00.000-07:00

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!

Marburg Place

2006-07-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

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!

Both Barrels

2006-07-27T11:54:00.000-07:00

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

Government Spending in Perspective

2006-07-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Zune

2006-07-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Power Floutage

2006-07-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

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!"

Accountable

2006-07-21T03:25:00.000-07:00

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".

Google Terrorist

2006-07-19T06:44:00.000-07:00

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

Stop Analyzing, and Start Seeing

2006-07-19T06:09:00.000-07:00

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?

I'll bet that...

2006-07-19T04:44:00.000-07:00

..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.

Yeah, that's me!

2006-07-19T04:05:00.000-07:00

Surprise. AT&T's shitty service disease is spreading.

Signed,

DB

Jawja

2006-07-18T21:46:00.000-07:00

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!"

Cool Page of the Day

2006-07-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

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.

Billmon's Velvet Hammer

2006-07-18T19:58:00.000-07:00

One of the top three writers in the blogosphere.*

Humble, too!

*Actual opinion.

Answer the Question, Mr. Gonzales

2006-07-18T19:32:00.000-07:00

“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."

Slashdot's Myopia

2006-07-17T01:14:00.000-07:00

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.

First Impressions

2006-07-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Achoogle

2006-07-14T00:34:00.000-07:00

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.

Best NYT Article in a while...

2006-07-13T22:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Arlen's Gambit

2006-07-13T14:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Humor Impaired Wingnuts

2006-07-11T17:18:00.000-07:00

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.

The Righteous and the Wicked

2006-07-10T22:27:00.000-07:00

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.

Bush Fire

2006-07-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

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?

Copyright

2006-07-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

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.

The Salt of the Earth

2006-07-10T09:21:00.000-07:00

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

Sunday Night Enron Empathy post

2006-07-09T23:50:00.000-07:00

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.

You know what's wrong with our press?

2006-07-09T20:34:00.000-07:00

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.

Yosemite at Night

2006-07-09T14:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Nagin

2006-07-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

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

Mistakes?

2006-07-08T15:43:00.000-07:00

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)

More on Digital...

2006-07-08T12:24:00.000-07:00

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.

What the hell are they up to, anyway?

2006-07-08T12:21:00.000-07:00

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."

2006-07-08T10:59:00.000-07:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

All you need to know about...

2006-07-08T10:26:00.000-07:00

...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!

Where's Photography Going, Anyway?

2006-07-07T18:18:00.000-07:00

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.

I have returned.

2006-07-07T18:11:00.000-07:00

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

The Bush goes to the Steppes

2005-11-22T01:52:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times:

ULAN BATOR, Mongolia, Nov. 21 - If you are an American president in need of just a few hours of temporary political asylum - no debate about Iraq, no Chinese leaders resisting the American agenda and plenty of adulation - here is an approach: Come to the endless steppes that Ghengis Khan made famous.

Hey - it's been a long time, but the pillager is back.

When Air Force One descended low over the barren but breathtaking landscape here, few Mongolians had ever seen anything like it.

Mongolians near the airport have never seen a 747? What the fuck?

I sincerely doubt it - if Air Force One can land there, odds are it ain't the first 747 to ever land there. Lay off the hyperbole, David.

None of the previous American presidents had made the journey while in office.

Because why? Care to fill us in instead of being a travel writer, David?

And so Mongolians came into this tattered post-Soviet capital, past what will soon be a monument celebrating the spectacular victories eight centuries ago, when the Mongol empire stretched from the Yellow Sea to Baghdad, to hear George W. Bush tell them that today, "Mongolia and the United States are standing together as brothers in the cause of freedom."

I'm sure they're all breathing a sigh of relief.

There is something else that seemed to thrill Mr. Bush about Mongolia: presidential entertainment is vivid.

Does he get free tickets to see Jarhead?

As his limousine raced across the steppe,

Must have been pretty fucking bumpy. Oh, wait - you mean the ROAD on the steppe.

a team of Mongolian warriors - carrying spears and shields and wearing the body armor that Ghengis Khan used to subdue territory that Mr. Bush is still grappling with 800 years later - suddenly appeared and galloped alongside

He wouldn't tolerate this from an American on a Palomino. Or am I wrong?

Pity. I hope he enjoyed his vetted show.

.....Iraq, Every Day, Everywhere

If Mongolia won its way into Mr. Bush's heart with its unflagging support for the war in Iraq, its attitude was the exception on his four-day trip. The war is deeply unpopular in Japan, his first stop, and his motorcade did not exactly attract huge crowds.

I don't like to hang around slaughterhouses, either. They smell like shit and death.

Things were worse in South Korea, where the defense minister announced, as a fact, that South Korea planned to trim its more than 3,000 troops in Iraq by a third next year.

Whoops!

Mr. Bush's aides scrambled to win a retraction. The president's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, called the South Korean foreign minister and was reassured, he said, of the country's "commitment to the mission."

We're committing to the mission of winning the war on terrorism by helping you commit to winning the war on terra!

President Bush may love Texas, and his ranch, as he reminded Mongolians when he compared their land to his beloved state. But his enthusiasm does not extend to another Mongolian passion - horses.

"I maht act like a cowboy, but I'll be damned if I ride one of those four-legged devils. Rummy told me that those bastards are off-limits."

When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was here a month ago, the Mongolians presented him with their highest honor: a beautiful gelding that he named Montana. So in a delicate act of diplomacy, the White House secured an agreement that President Enkhbayar Nambar would not give Mr. Bush a horse. But since the secretary of defense had to look his gift in the mouth - leaving it here, at least temporarily, because it was a bit difficult to transport on his official plane - Mr. Bush found another way to saddle up.

"I'm here on an important international mission," Mr. Bush said at the opening of his speech in Government House. "Secretary Rumsfeld asked me to check on his horse."

Heh heh. Rummy, we needed some glue to hold our Iraq strategery together...sorry 'bout 'yer horsie.

-D

Cloning Tips

2005-11-07T20:47:00.000-08:00

Lordy, it's been a while.

I've been cloning out some older film scan master files, and I thought I'd share some good ideas.

Good Idea #1: Clone at 100%.

Look, it's just not a good idea to try to clone out defects at anything less than 100%. You'll kill your eyes, miss details, and waste paper when you have that "A-ha" moment upon realizing the print you're about to deliver has ph* from the original film right along the edge, where everyone will see it.

Good Idea #2: Get a scroll mouse.

Cloning always involves moving through an entire image, and a mouse with a scroll wheel makes this arduous task a lot easier. Whether you are cloning out dirt from your digital camera's sensor or scratches from a careless film processing company, paging through 300 megabytes of image data can be no fun. A scroll wheel won't have you doing somersaults, but it does speed things up.

I usually clone from the top left corner to the lower right. I used to move in blocks by using the Page Down key, scanning the image on the screen for defects, then hitting Page Down again until I'd reviewed one vertical "row" of the image. Then I'd click once in the bottom scroll bar to move right and start using Page Up to move up along the next row.

Like mowing a yard....ad infinitum. This takes your hands off the mouse a lot, adding the risk of nasty computyer-related wrist injuries.

The ability to notch slowly and precisely up and down through an image (as opposed to a page at a time with the Page Up/Down keys) is a godsend on my 300-600MB 4X5 scans. I use one hand on the scroll wheel and mouse buttons while another toggles the option key (to define the origin for cloning or healing brushes).

Another advantage is that the scrolling action, while a little slower than typing Page Up several times, is a lot better at helping you catch dust. The picture should be moving along slowly in front of your eyes - almost scrolling, but at a much more controlled and constant speed. The advantage is twofold - no artifacts from redrawing (at least on my computer) and your eyes' natural propensity for catching small objects in motion against a background is apt to help you notice miscellaneous gradoux.

On Mac OS X, holding the shift key causes the scroll wheel to switch axes; once I reach the bottom or top of an image, I can precisely move over to the next "row" by holding Shift and moving the wheel one notch down to nudge to the right. I'm pretty sure it'd work this way in Windows, too.

Good Idea #3: Practice using the Cloning Brush

This sounds like an entry into the "duh" awards, but at least with film scans, repeated abuse of the healing brush will soften and mush out the grain structure. In a big print, you'll definitely see this effect, and it is distracting.

Photographers I talk to often have the attitude that the "Healing Brush makes the Cloning Brush obsolete". That might be true in many cases, but it's still a good idea to practice being precise with the cloning brush. It takes some practice and skill, but before long, you'll be Option/Alt-clicking at a mad pace.

Another reason to stick with the cloning tool is along the edges. If you have your film scanned full-frame like I do and use cropping guides instead of cropping your originals, (cropping originals is destructive editing, and that's a Bad Thing) you'll find that the healing brush's intelligence is limited along the edges of an image. To do it's magic, the healing brush averages pixels from around the brush area into the brush area; it's almost impossible to use this tool to hide defects along edges because the black edges are "averaged" into the image area.

I had another good cloning idea, but I forgot what it was.

*ph - a catch-all term for those curly-cue pieces of dust. I'll let you guess at the etymology.

Playing Politics

2005-09-02T13:41:00.000-07:00

"I hope people don't play politics during this period of time," Mr. Bush told Diane Sawyer of ABC's "Good Morning America" in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. - New York Times, 8/1/05

It's good to know that stopping for a ten minute press opportunity with the former head of the G.O.P. while using a backdrop of badly-needed equipment and personnel is not "playing politics". I'm glad that the head of FEMA, who doesn't even know that there's a difference between the Superdome and the Convention Center has plenty of time between his six hours of interviews yesterday to coordinate response.

I am heartened that Mr. Bush was able to take time during his press opportunity to show that he has not lost his sense of humor, joking about rebuilding millionaire Trent Lott's second home. No political play there. Now Marine One is departing for an aerial tour of New Orleans, doubtless clearing a five mile radius of rescue and recovery operations for "security reasons".

I noticed that there was no audio coverage of Bush's first moments with Ray Nagin, and no planned meeting with Governor Blanco. They're both Democrats.

All the impoverished New Orleanians bitching about living in shit, wading past bodies, and dying of thirst for five days before getting substantive relief should just shut up. And I hope the residents of Biloxi, Gulfport, Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis remember how supportive Haley Barbour has been of Bush's inaction.

I am happy Honore is on the ground. He's a smart man, demanding troops keep their muzzles down, declaring "This is NOT Iraq!" and generally getting shit done.

He should have been there four days ago.

Malkin's Book at Manzanar

2005-08-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

From the letter I recieved from the National Park Service:

Thank you very much for your inquiry about the presence of Michelle
Malkin’s In Defense of Internment in our Manzanar History Association (MHA)
bookstore at Manzanar National Historic Site.

Our decision to carry the book in Fall 2004 followed extensive review and
consultation with historians, academics, former internees, and others.
The consensus was that, while none substantially agreed with Ms. Malkin’s
conclusions or scholarship, it is not the role of the National Park
Service to censor dissenting viewpoints, past or present. (DB) Unless your view happens to be that the park service employs too many enforcement rangers
As one
prominent academic stated, “providing only one perspective is not
education, it is propaganda. There are not many books written with this
general perspective, and it’s important to include dissenting views.”

Hot

2005-07-25T11:37:00.000-07:00

Yes, it is certainly hot around here today. Here's what I use to keep cool in Cawleeforneeya.

Doug's Swamp Cooler

What you'll need:

-Glass carboy or other cylinder open on one end.
-Terry cloth towels - find 'em at Kragen, cheap!
-Spray bottle (clean, with water in it, stupid)
-Clothespins
-A fan

Set the carboy on a chair, and fill it about 1/3 full with cool water from the tap. Wrap the terry cloth towels around it, and use the clothespins to keep them from falling off. I tie the ends of the towels together around the neck of the carboy for added adhesion.

Liberally (ha ha) spray the towels with water until they're almost saturated. Make sure they stick to the sides of the carboy.

Direct the fan at the wetted towels on teh carboy. Watch the temperature in the room drop 2-5 degrees.

Keep wetting the towels throughout the day. If you're in dry ol' Cawleeforneeya like me, you'll need to respray the towels every half-hour or so, depending on the speed of your fan.

Now you've made your own swamp cooler from stuff you have laying around the house. Enjoy the slightly-less-than-insane heat!

Napster to Go versus iTunes

2005-03-05T19:36:00.000-08:00

I'm sure you've all seen Napster's "Do the Math" campaign on TV. The ads purport that the combination of the Napster to Go subscription service and .mp3 players other than the iPod are more economical than Apple's iTunes.

It goes something like this:

10,000 iTunes songs + iPod 40GB = $10,000.

X number of songs from about a million hosted on Napster to Go + 40GB .mp3 player = $15.00 a month.

Now, I'll admit that I'm a softie for Apple at heart, but I think Napster's commercials are misleading as hell. So, with that in mind, here are some interesting facts for friends who ask "What's so great about iTunes and the iPod?"

-You can listen to any number Napster songs for 55 years (or 666 months) for $10,000.00. You can listen to 10,000 iTunes songs forever for $10,000. This is assuming that you don't have any money sunk into CDs already.

-For those who don't own any CDs, they're gonna hve to pony up for broadband. Napster to Go won't fit through a modem.

-Napster's songs stop playing when you stop paying. Then you're stuck with an .mp3 player that isn't an iPod. And if you do join the ranks of iPod users, you can't listen to any of that $15.00/mo. music.

-iTunes lets you transcode music you buy to a CD for easy listening on 15-year-old CD players with minimal quality loss. I hope you like that ugly-ass Dell DJ, because Napster's service won't let you listen to your music on anything else, including CD players.

-Apple's commercials feature hot dancers and new music, from which you may learn to bust a move or two. Napster's commercials feature...a cartoon cat with headphones and some invalid equations.

-Apple got famous designing great computers and software. Napster got cool because it was an application for stealing music.

I plan to live forever and I won't be seen with a music player that isn't an iPod, so I'm going with iTunes.
-
--
http://homepage.mac.com/vought

They Don't Want to Think

2005-02-14T23:10:00.000-08:00

I was just struck with how something a friend told me several months ago rings completely, absolutely, true.

John told me that supporters of the right-wing conservatives listen to Rush, Hannity, Fox News, and the like simply because the massive complexity of today's issues need distillation. The right-wing media pundits and scaremongers provide that distillation and the flavoring for today's red staters.

And let's face it - Rush's audience isn't exactly culturally diverse. Bobby Jindal and Alan Keyes are about as diverse as the right wing gets.

This idea ties back into why Eason Jordan can be pilloried by right-wingers into unemployment for something he said off the record and recanted immediately, while a closeted prostitute was given a daily White House press pass for nearly two years, called upon by the president and his press secreatary, and...well, not much attention has been paid to this turn of events, actually.

No one seems to give a shit that a prostitute has been carrying water for and throwing lifelines out to the administration every day for almost two years. You know - the administration that wants everyone to believe that gays can be "fixed" and that allowing gays to marry would be the end of the Republic as we know it.

So, here's where things stand. Right wing pundits consist of and are defended by:

-A drug abuser who has suggested drug abusers be put to death, and who has subsequently pulled every legal trick in the book to keep his medical records from being used in the criminal trial against him.
-A prostitute who has been given a press pass to the White House daily briefing for nearly every day over the past two years, despite the fact that he works for a GOP-funded "news" organization.
-A reporter for the New York Times who assisted and defended an Iranian spy who, through to subvert the process of democracy in Iraq.
-A commentator for a CNN "debate" show who is directly implicated in the dissemination of information about a covert CIA agent.
-Did I mention the prostitute?

See, it's easier for them to force things down your throat when you don't think, America. Do you complain when the trash people dump crap on your street? Do you get upset when the treasurer of your company embezzles funds? Are you outraged when preachers decry immorality while molesting little children? If you answered no to any of these questions, tune into the Rush Limbaugh show - he's right up your alley.

Remember friends, it's not the sex, it's the lying. And Clinton was a terrible President, not just because no one could ever pin any of that state-trooper killing, cocaine-using, Vince Foster-killing stuff on him, but because he had a personal extra-marital affair during work hours in the White House.

Jonah Goldberg is a Coward, Part II - The Doughy Pantsload

2005-02-07T22:42:00.000-08:00

The following is the text of an e-mail I sent to Jonah Goldberg after reading his rationaliztion column:

Dear Mr. Goldberg:
I've been following your "debate" online with Juan Cole for a few days now. I have to say that I'm quite amused at the rate at which you seem to be embarrassing yourself with half-truths about Cole. Your indignant prose doesn't cover up the smell of inadequacy wafting from your latest column.

Yet it isn't Cole's response or your pathetic reply that led me to write this letter. No, it's your excuse for not volunteering for duty in Iraq.

To insist that you can't go to war because you have a child, that you are 35, that you have a house to pay for, and a wife who loves you ignores the brave sacrifice of over 1400 young men and women who went there anyway and died. It is simply disgusting that as a private citizen you fomented for war, acted as a cheerleader, and fell back on excuses when asked why you did not volunteer your own life for such an important cause. The dead and maimed in Iraq (on both sides) all had obligations and yes, even loved ones, and you should be deeply ashamed that you even tried to compare yourself to them.

Here's a white feather for you; maybe it'll inspire you to develop some humility after your excuses for not joining the war you seem so eager for others to wage in your name.

If you don't know of the tradition of a white feather, try reading this web page:

http://www.firstworldwar.com/atoz/whitefeathers.htm

and this site:

http://whitefeatherforjonah.com

Sincerely,

Douglas Broussard

Jonah Goldberg is a Coward

2005-02-06T13:51:00.000-08:00

He won't debate Juan Cole? What a coward.

Jonah Goldberg, the doughy pantsload!

Famous People from Carencro

2005-01-28T21:27:00.000-08:00

Turns out I know some other famous people from Carencro.

Marc Broussard, whose album Carencro has impressed me immensely, is famous. He's also damn good. Marc and his dad Ted owned the lot behind ours in Lexington Heights during the 1980s, and slthough I'm a bit older, my dad tells me Marc and I used to play under the gum tree behind our lot before it was cut down.

Eric Mouton, a middle school friend, showed me how to ride a horse properly and is a famous rodeo guy. Eric and I were good friends for a long time; his family was the epitome of Cajun hospitality.

Doug Broussard is a famous photographer and digital imaging luminary who is also me.

Apple's announcement...

2005-01-13T23:13:00.000-08:00

will sell a ton of Mac Minis in two years. When people realize they can't run the latest and greatest, they will have to buy a new machine to keep up with the Joneses.

Given the creeping resource requirements of Longhorn, you'll need something relatively powerful to run it. Powerful usually means big and loud. The mini suports quartz extreme with it's 32MB Radeon, but $500.00 mass-manufactured PCs definitely don't, Buy a new PC today, and when Longhorn finally ships, you get to spend money and time upgrading your curent piece of shit - or you can just buy a new machine.

Now remember, these people already have monitors, keyboards, and mice. The mini comes with none of these. Just replace your old, decrepit PC with a Mac mini.

Apple is introducing this new idea and expression of the home computer now, because it gives them time to gradually inform the market, generate buzz, and work up to a similar condition to what we see with the iPod today.

They will learn from this first, good product, and make something even better. The iMac was the first example of this thinking; iPod was the most successful. Start with only the best ideas and build upon them. Kill the bad ideas quickly. Drop the size, drop the cost. Apple is innovating at hyperspeed, catching up for years lost wandering in the wilderness.

If you're going to spend $500.00 on a new machine so you can run a new OS, what's to keep you from geting one of these Mac Mini things anyway? Especially when you can just hook it to the TV, put it in Simple Finder, and give one to granny for e-mailing pictures of her fancy dog to her friends with fancy dogs?

Adobe and Apple's Recent Announcements

2005-01-13T15:39:00.000-08:00

Watch the MacWorld keynote - The iPhoto demo starts about 35 minutes in. It's getting very close to what Elements once was. Cool Blade Runner-style zoom and pan.

Adobe ought to rethink how they approach the entry level photo collection and editing market before Apple puts a sizable dent into their revenue stream with the Mac mini and iPhoto 5/6/etc. Adobe wants you to use one or two pieces of software to do what iPhoto does in version 5 - and the Adobe software isn't nearly as well integrated.

All they can think about how to do is how to be like Microsoft. They keep killing or hobbling Mac products like Framemaker and Premiere because they are certain that they cannot compete with Apple - so they decide to write software for what appears to be a platform now beginning to lose it's dominance. If it's taken Adobe this long to move to a very Windows-centric business (since 1995 or so, when they really started trying)...

Adobe, you are going to have to innovate hard to survive. It's not looking good from where this Photoshop user sits. Apple is shipping a $599.00 computer that a video camera owner can use to create high definition DVDs - WITHOUT BUYING A THING EXTRA.

Smoky Rolls-Royce engines on Delta 757

2005-01-09T23:49:00.000-08:00

It's worth mentioning and wondering aloud in the websphere: does Delta or Rolls-Royce do something different with engine maintenance that makes for hard, smoky starts?

i've noticed over the years at airports from one coast to another that Delta RB-211s on L-1011s always started amidst huge puffs of white oilsmoke. I was told by some veteran pilots that this is normal for the RB211 on an L-1011 - especially near the end of the 'plane's useful lifetime, as Delta's aircraft were.

On Christmas eve, Patrice and I took a Delta 757-200 to Atlanta on the way to Baton Rouge. After pushback from the gate in San Francisco, the engine start seemed to take longer than the normal 30 seconds or so, and some shadows drifted by in the early morning sunrise light illuminating the cabin. Seated aft of the wing, I had a good view of the right engine lighting in a smallish puff or white smoke - and a not-so-great view of the left engine lighting in a HUGE and protracted steam of blue, then white smoke.

So, any pilots or turbine mechanics out there have insight? One would think with turbines that this might be a wet start caused by an oil overfill during overnight maintenance or an overly rich mixture keeping the combustion chamber cold during start. I understand that with the original RB-211s on L10-11s, the white smoke on starts was due to oil gaskets cold-soaking while the ket sat at the gate.

No more politics.

2005-01-04T14:13:00.000-08:00

Just photography.

I've moved back to the Bay Area to live with my fianceé Patrice.

While I'm no longer a resident of California's "Red Belt", I'm still concerned about the creeping Boboism in our state, as the suburbs of cities like Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, Redding, and others encompass ever more of the state's wild places.

With this post, I'll mark the change of this blog to more things photographic and fewer things political. Perhaps by showing people the most effective and moving ways to view the world around them, we can convince them that California and by extension the rest of the United States is not simply a place to be developed, but an entire world to be preserved and cared for.

Holier than thou...

2004-11-14T13:18:00.000-08:00

And on the eighth day...

Purple Mountains Majesty

2004-11-04T23:52:00.000-08:00

Check out these interesting projections of the voter turnout by county in two dimensions over at Crooked Timber.

Something odd influenced this election. I'm not ready to fall into conspiracy land and suggest that Diebold software somehow skewed the results for Bush; at the same time, I'm not entirely sure that the results didn't get screwed with somewhere between the booth and Wednesday morning.

Hrm.

Faith-based Voting and how to convert the religious right

2004-11-04T13:43:00.000-08:00

Well, the votes are counted, and we've got four more years of President Bush. Apparently the "evangelical Christian" vote turned out for Bush in key states.

My strategy as a Democrat over the next four years will be to work with every single evangelical I know - with every single religious person I know - to stress that Bush does not represent their interests. I will do this by holding up the teachings of Jesus in constrast to the actions of Bush. The case makes itself. Bush does not govern according to the teachings which Jesus laid down; check his actions against the Beatitudes.

I think that this kind of outreach to evangelical Christians can make the difference in the next election. Too many liberals have attacked this group for their beliefs, making fun of people who pray to the "invisible guy in the clouds" and alienating the very group Republicans have been cultivating for thirty years.

Are we liberals hypocrites? I don't hear any liberals making fun of Buddhists (invisible and unprovable perfect state of being), Muslims (invisible cloud guy again), or Hindus (blue multi-armed lady).

Liberals, here are your marching orders for the next four years:

1. Read a little bit about Jesus Christ. You don't have to believe His teachings - approach them from a scholarly viewpoint, as you would when reading about Shiva or Buddha. In particular, check out the Beatitudes.

2. try to think about the abuses of this administration in terms of "What Would Jesus Do?" Oh, I can hear your eyes rolling in your heads now.

3. Step three? There is no step three. Just apply logic to what you've read, and contrast the teachings of Jesus with the practices of the Bush administration. While hotbutton issues like Gay Marriage and Abortion will always bring out the "liberal haters brigade", you can be very convincing when making arguments like: "Would Jesus approve of the death penalty while condemning abortion? Why does Goerge Bush?"*

Why would I do this? Because I work and live with some very conservative Christians who are pissed that Bush is destroying the environment (that the Christian God and Jesus asked us to take care of), but who still voted for him because he "stands for their values". For too long, the religious right has used "religious values" a.k.a. morals, a.k.a. "basic right and wrong" to paint the Democratic party and liberals in general as pandering to the most base of human desires.

Since God, through Jesus, specifically taught that compassion and humility are to be elevated above all else, that good works are the path to heaven, it would seem easy to make the case that Democrats - the truly compassionate party - are closer to the religious and

Another point; when it comes to Gay Marriage (which I support, through civil unions) and Abortion (which I personally don't have a say in, being sans uterus and all), realize that these two issues are nowhere specifically forbidden in the New Testament. Jesus worked with individuals; he didn't rise up in government to issue edicts upon all people. Encourage evangelicals to emulate Jesus' good work by truly following His teachings and working with downtrodden or disadvantaged individuals who have individual problems instead of appointing modern Pharisees like George Bush and Dick Cheney to do "God's work" by blanketing our country with well-meaning but ultimately misguided laws.

I think this strategy can work. Don't make fun of people - gain a better understanding of them and apply that understanding toward electing the next truly compassionate President of the united States.

*I would think Jesus might not be all that happy about the death penalty, since it was imposed on Him.
** I'm a Catholic, somewhat lapsed, but I think it helps me understand where people are coming from.

The best dancing in the Bay Area this weekend

2004-09-24T01:42:00.000-07:00

Come to Berkeley and see Shen Wei Dance Arts

I gar-awn-tee it'll be a good show. Tickets are still available for Saturday and Sunday's shows. Shen Wei's work deserves to be seen by anyone in the Bay Area or nearby who has any interest in new, inventive, and exciting dance. I saw the company at licoln Center last year in New York, and was blown away.

His choreographic combination of modern dance, Chinese Opera, and other forms along with innovative stage settings makes for a dynamic and entertaining show. His dancers (including my incredibly talented sister) are precise, expressive, and passionate.

If you're a guy, take your girl out for anice dinner, then bring her to the show.

If you're a girl, make your guy take you out for dinner, then go to the show. If he really liked it, consider having sex with him.

The truth about John Kerry's Iraq votes

2004-09-11T13:07:00.000-07:00

Note to die-yhard Republicans: this site may cause your brain to explode, as it directly contraverts the Sean Hannity Truth Distortion Field.

The truth about John Kerry's consistent position on the Iraq war. John Kerry hasn't been flip-flopping. George Bush just hasn't been listening.

Is this horse out of the gate?

2004-09-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

Front page of NYtimes, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today...maybe these newly surfaced documents are finally going to wakt the media and public up to the fact that George W. Bush shirked his duty, disobeyed direct orders, and dishonored his unit.

I read through an e-mail the RNC[omittee] sent to Bush-Cheney '04 volunteers. All of the sudden, fear is popping out among the religious right and Republicans in general like flop sweat all over their campaign. This smells like scandal, and as they know all too well from pillorying Clinton for eight years, scandal stinks worse than any other political corpse.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch, what with their lip service to veterans and insults to those vets injured in action on the floor of the RNC[onvention]

Power Macintosh G5 Arcana

2004-09-08T19:15:00.000-07:00

My Power Macintosh G5, with two 2.0GHz processors and 1.5GB of RAM does just about everything I ask - quickly.

I decided to see what the thermal impact of all this hard work might be - how much can a G5 warm up extremely dry (5-10% rH) air while working really hard?

Processor settings:

Processor 1: On
Processor 2: On
Nap mode: Off
Processor performance: Highest
Processor load: Between 80-90% utilization for each processor.

Inlet air temp: 67.5 degrees F.
Exhaust air temp: (Average of two exhaust grilles for processor section) 94.7 degrees F.

What if I disable a processor?

Processor 1: On
Processor 2: Off
Nap mode: Off
Processor performance: Highest
Processor load: Between 80-90% utilization.

Inlet air temp: 67.5 degrees F.
Exhaust air temp: (Average of two exhaust grilles for processor section) 91.2 degrees F.

I guess I should go take a walk outside or something. A post like this is a sure sign I've been inside too long today.

Great Post on MS DRM

2004-09-08T11:52:00.000-07:00

Check this post on Daring Fireball.

October Surprise Coming Along Nicely

2004-09-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

Just heard on CBS radio news...

Apparently we're "hot on the trail" of Bin Laden.

Funny, didn't the president just give a speech where Bin Laden's name wasn't mentioned once?

Latest Kerry Smear being floated

2004-09-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

On Rush's program a few minutes ago, a guest writing a book (for Republicans to buy, not read) told the story that I think will become the latest Kerry smear. This tale one-ups the swift boat vets and slinks into the clinton-bought-cocaine-through state-trooper-pimps territory.

Apparently, some members of Vietnam Veterans against the War wanted to kill six senators, and Kerry resigned from the group. He also avoided a meeting in Kansas city where the plot was discussed.

The writer on Rush's show insists that he's got some witnesses who saw Kerry at the meeting, that his letter of resignation from VVaW doesn't exist, and that Kerry eats babies.

The smear machine just won't stop. Kerry starts the final part of the campaign with a rousing speech, and the republicans start with another goddamn smear. They can't run on the issues, so they try to embarass their opponent.

No shame.

Never Far From the Tree

2004-09-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

While I didn't personally see the Bush twins' performance last night, by all accounts it was a ditzy disaster.

Here's something to think about, pulled from the comments at Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly blog:

Bill and Hillary Clinton: Valueless, self-indulgent children of the 60s, or simply white trash. What kind of daughter did they raise?

George and Laura Bush: God-fearing conservatives with rock-solid American values. What kind of daughters did they raise?

Well, here's the answer:

Bill and Hillary somehow found time between killing close friends, moving tons of cocaine across the border, and being sexually deviant to raise an intelligent, assertive, and well-spoken woman. A graduate of Stanford University, Chelsea has an impressive resume already.

The more conservative pair of parents were able to find the time in their busy schedules of ruining businesses, vehicular homicide and being a dry drunk to raise two girls that, frankly, made an embarassment of themselves on national TV. I mean really - let's call a spade a spade. Simply from the transcript, it appears that these two are a case of tequila away from Girls Gone Wild.

Now, some of you out there may be thinking that it's wrong to pillory these girls based on the way they act and talk, but isn't that what we're being asked to do with their dad?

Never fear Bush girls - daddy set a good precedent. At 22, you've still got 18 years of partying ahead of you before it's time to straighten up and fly right.

Purple Hearts

2004-08-31T12:12:00.000-07:00

Republicans think it's funny to make light of other people's service and injuries.

Wy don't you call Morton Blackwell, the person responsible for this on his 800 line and leave him a message? It'll only cost him a few bucks and you a few minutes.

My Letter to Wolf Blitzer

2004-08-30T19:26:00.000-07:00

Write to Wolf here.

While I'm impressed with President Bush's resolve, I'm troubled by this administration's habit of not punishing failure.

If, as he claimed in his 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush seeks to run Government like a business, will he ever find a reason to fire anyone? The Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal is one example I can think of in which no senior administration officials have been taken to task.

Someting you won't hear at the RNC

2004-08-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

Sure, you'll hear a lot of people this week proclaiming that everything bad ever is the Democrats' fault, but take a look at these numbers before you decide who to vote for this November: (via dailykos)

Change, real median household income (2003 adjusted dollars)

Bush II: -$1,535

Clinton: +$5,489

Bush I: -$1,314

Change, number in poverty

Bush II: +4,280,000

Clinton: -6,433,000

Bush I: +6,269,000

Here is the source for these numbers, the Census Bureau.

Sould this story get any traction, look for the Republican noise machine to immediately put forth autoritative sounding evidence that te Census bureau is partisan.

Laura Bush Make Me Sick

2004-08-29T08:03:00.000-07:00

Or, as Atrios puts it "spits on Veterans".

These people aren't America. They're mean-spirited, bitter and frigid soccer moms and severe, detached dry-drunk dads treating the people of this nation like a scared, codependent child.

iPod, Rendezvous and video

2004-08-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me after my last post that the WiFi iPod would of course have to have Rendezvous. Think about what that means in terms of updating your iPod wirelessly over your home LAN. Easy cheesy - a bit like updating your phone's address book over Bluetooth, but more satisfying.

The PortalPlayer 5002($latestversion) chip in the latest iPod is immensely capable; it's essentially a dual-ARM7 core CPU with a fair bit of media (vector) and interface logic (USB 1.1 in the 5002c/d and 5003) hanging off of it. (I helped update the processor register and other technical manuals for the PP 5002 and PP 5003 a few years ago, and I think that's about all I can divulge without blowing my NDA.)

I thought it obvious at some point after the first-gen iPod shipped that Apple would add video to the iPod, but before we saw the second generation of iPod, I'd dismissed that notion out of hand.

Video adds a lot of complexity to the software layer of the iPod without a clear demand or content for the feature. Apple is better (in the post-Amelio era, that is) than most companies at cutting out product features that won't be used or have no strategic value. Power budget would go into the toilet with video - a color screen, the extra memory and higher CPU usage would prohibit the current handy form factor - a much larger battery would be needed to "do" video.

I'm fascinated by these things and I still don't have one. I don't see getting one any time soon either, but they're only going to get more capable. when I can afford one, it'll be even better than now, right?

iPod, Airport, and rumors

2004-08-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

I noticed a few rumors floating around in the Mac websphere yesterday about Apple possibly adding wireless support to the iPod.

Well, duh. While I used to work there, I'm certainly not privy to any super-secret product plans. I can tell you that the post-Amelio Apple is never content to let a product like AirTunes/iPod sit around languishing.

When AirPort Express was announced, I was surprised that it lacked some features. Apple's never been very big on remotes. I can remember exactly three Apple products that shipped with or offered optional remotes. (Macintosh TV, PowerCD, and Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh.) That said, I don't think Apple's next addition to the AirTunes product family will be a remote.

I suspect that WiFi will be used to stream music directly to the AirPort Express from the iPod. The only reason this isn't happening now is probably because of power budget for the iPod and the ever-shrinking packaging for the iPod. The first obstacle will fall soon; WiFi chipsets (should only need 802.11b for streaming) are getting less power hungry all the time.

The packaging issue is thorny, though. Where do you put an antenna on the iPod? For a quarter-wave 802.11 (2.4GHz) omnidirectional antenna to work, you need to expose about 1/8" of the antenna. (Exposed in the RF sense; it can still hide behind a plastic window, a la the PowerBook G4 Titanium.) Finding the room and power budget for this feature will likely give a lot more people a new reason to buy an iPod - wireless streaming to the stereo without a computer - and will keep the other companies out there scambling to design something as well-rounded as the iPod.

John Kerry: Mac User

2004-08-28T11:01:00.000-07:00

I noticed when thumbing through Diana Walker's great photo essay in the July 19 Time magazine that John Kerry uses a PowerBook G4 Titanium. The rear ports are visible, and it looks to be either a 400, 500, or 550MHz machine.

Not that I'm surprised, but it does show a capacity for making intelligent decisions. Clinton was a Mac user, too.

Nice Move(on), Mr. Exley

2004-08-27T13:53:00.000-07:00

MoveOn.org PAC has the first ads up from their "10 Weeks" series.

Check out the first one, by Benny Booms. Pretty powerful stuff.

Republican Radio Rules

2004-08-27T11:56:00.000-07:00

I was listening to Rush's stand-in this morning. He seems to attract more moderates than Rush, but his fact checking and reasoning skills are certainly on par with OxyBoy.
Par example:

Paraphrased
"The Olympics...Field Hockey is on now. You know, why can they have field hockey...I haven't seen real hockey in the games yet. When is that gonna be on? How come we can have field hockey and not real hockey?"

For the sports-impaired out there, "real" hockey (and by this I presume he means Ice Hockey) is played during the Winter Olympics.

Christian Music

2004-08-27T10:50:00.004-07:00

Got this e-mail from a friend:

****** been working here from 6-9 (or 10, this week!) in the mornings. As
I was about to put Ice Cube in the CD player/boombox, I noticed it was
switched to "FM", but the volume was turned all the way down.

I turned the volume up and listened for a bit. That damn Christian rock is
ruining the ears of today's kids! All I heard in ten minutes were
two-and-a-half of the worst, most repetitive, limp-wristed 1985 light rock
style crap songs I've ever heard!

I mean this stuff is bad. One song featured a moony-voiced christian rocker
type (probably thin and with a weedy mustache) singing "Alleluia" sixteen
times in a row. What kind of fucking song is that? Listening to that song
made me pine for 3000-year-old father ******* from St. Peters. At least he
put some emotion into his "Alleluias".

The next song was even better. Rocking out to the same wimpy chord Amy Grant
made popular in 1983, another weedy-mustached thin guy started singing about
how he's gonna "want salvation from his holy god".

Got news for you pal - salvation is waiting right underneath singing lessons in your "things to do"
pile.

But I guess not all Christian rock is bad. It sends a positive message to
today's youth: "You might dress like Prince Valiant and act like a
soft-hearted punk, but you can still get rich in the music business trading
on people's desperate hopes and dreams."

Bob Herbert Makes You Think

2004-08-26T22:05:00.000-07:00

Because like Clinton said: "When people think, Democrats win."

Bush - Repeat Offender

2004-08-26T21:08:00.001-07:00

Looks like George W. Bush has presided over prison abuse before. I just got this e-mail from a friend:

Right now....ABC's Nightline exposing Brazoria (sp?) County, Texas Prison Abuses in 1997 under GWB.

GWB knew about the problems and did nothing for months.

Same as he did with Abu Ghraib.

The pictures from Texas are chilling and as bad or worse than Abu Ghraib.

GO NIGHTLINE.....

This would be interesting if the mainstream press would pick it up and run with it, but I don't have much confidence they will. Asleep at the switch.

First Picture Post

2004-08-26T19:50:00.000-07:00

Here's a good read from CJR

2004-08-26T19:26:00.000-07:00

I started reading Columbia Journalism review when I was 11.

No, really - my mom has been a subscriber for as long as I can remember, and I used to pick up her copy of CJR and skim through it. I won't say I understood the import of much of that skimming when I was prepubescent, but I could tell it was a serious magazine that was well-repected.

Here's a great article from CJR about the media's complicity in the Swift Boat Liars for Bush ruckus:

http://www.campaigndesk.org/archives/000851.asp

Got my Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker today...

2004-08-24T18:51:00.000-07:00

I got my Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker in the mail today, put it in the rear window of my car, and drove into town earlier.

Already got one nasty look! From a guy in a big, jacked-up pickup, no less.

Living in a Freeper Town

2004-08-24T13:03:00.000-07:00

This is my first post in this format. Blogger sure makes this easy - my first blog was started in 1998 and ran through 2000 - manually updated pages and lots of fun tweaking HTML tables made it too much work after a while.

I'll blog here about political stuff and what it's like to live in an unincorporated town in an extremely conservative (and strangely enough, dominated by white men!) small town in California. I'll also occasionally pontificate on fine art photography, digital printing the right way, and other stuff.

Stay tuned. It should be fun for all of us.