gregory42

OTOH BF1943 R0xx0rs

2012-01-17T09:46:00.000-05:00

OK SRSLY? No RLY. Dude.

So I am 40 hours into playing Battlefield 3 now. Why do I keep playing a game that I hate so much? Mostly because I hate how difficult it is. I've gone on about that way too much already. The problems still remain and you learn to work through them as you gain familiarity with all of the diverse game mechanics involved with the whole BF3 experience.

On The Other Hand... I got 3 things with my BF3 game:

A pass to play online without getting bonked for an additional $10 (that apparently you have to pay if you rent the game!?)
Downloadable content: Return to Karkand & the Advanced Ballistics whatever...
Downloadable content: Battlefield 1943 - The Whole Game

Perhaps in one of the mildly hallucinatory pits of my slightly disturbing adrenaline curves that seem to accompany playing this game I started poking at BF1943.

WOW!

This is a Whole Different Experience! Certain things are missing, sure: Crawling on the ground fully prone, quick-switch to pistol when you're out of ammo & animations showing who killed you & most noticeably the Knife

However - and this is a weird thing to find myself saying - the graphics not being so intense actually makes the game more enjoyable. The stark noon-day-beach lighting applied to every map - the absence of the 1,001 distracting little animated objects blowing around - and the higher contrast of the enemies against their background - all of these contribute to what amounts to an easier game.

I have been playing this more or less exclusively now for several days and I find myself getting just as engaged in it, but I don't get stressed out by it. Interestingly the voice-overs don't seem to include the word 'fuck' at all - whereas in BF3 every sentence uses it as punctuation. I find it odd that I even notice that but the absence of it is conspicuous when you switch from one to the other.

I am certain that I picked up BF1943 faster because of the intensity of learning to aim & run & throw grenades in BF3 in live combat. Ironically I love the tutorial mode in 1943. This is a deal-changer. If they simply added a similar tutorial mode in BF3 where you can walk around a base & try out all kits & all of the vehicles - on their own - the game would be far more enjoyable for beginners and casual players when people played on-line.

The only thing that I can point out as being weird and negative is the odd sort of Japanese stereotypes that seem to appear in the graphics. I try to ignore it as there is nothing that is distinctly offensive - but it is very very weird and surreal.

Liam Neeson is a Loser

2011-12-19T12:14:00.001-05:00

My guess is that Liam Neeson desperately wants to be Patrick Stewart. He wants to be an aging actor who can sit back & collect merchandising royalties from Action Figures.

Does anyone think "action movie" when they think of this putz?

But let's have a look:
1. Batman Begins - lookatmeee I'm a Ninja with an Irish accent! I'm such a badass I taught Batman everything he knows...

2. The Arrogant Jedi - who -=SPOILER ALERT=- couldn't swing a light sabre to save his life - literally. But he came back from the dead to teach Yoda... how to come back from the dead apparently... A useful trick when you can't beat your enemies in a fair fight.

3. Taken : You're a retired special ops guy who's humping it as a bodyguard & you're going to single-handedly take on the French Secret Service, the Paris Police Force & the Saudi White-Slavery ring - killing everyone in your way - because your daughter did everything possible to put herself into danger and is more or less getting what she deserves if not slightly better.

4. The Grey .... The reason why I now hate this son of an ape. In this film he shows that people capable of creating fire apparently can't scare away wolves but instead need to have it out in close quarters caveman style combat. The trailer alone already breaks with reality & the behavior of wolves to a point where I feel like I've hot-tub-timewarped to the Spanish Inquisition....

I don't think that he'll be coming to my house any time soon - but if he does - I'm putting my dogs on him and we will see how this really turns out... Sarah Palin & Michael Vick are similarly "invited".

I still h8 BF3

2011-12-15T16:31:00.000-05:00

Going onto the Forums was a mistake. I will compound this mistake if I buy a headset. Anyone who is playing this game and is under the age of 4x has long been assimilated into the culture of feeding on the corpses of n00bs.

Here is some advice: If you see a server that says "n00bs welcome" run. Don't walk, run away. That server is populated by parasites who are just sitting there waiting to kill you over & over & get easy points & unlocks from doing so.

In other games, for example World of Warcraft, when people get to be a much higher level that you with much greater abilities -- they aren't really allowed to play with you anymore. IF they choose to do so, they won't get *anything* from killing things that are too much weaker than they.

In Battlefield 3 it is exactly the opposite. Since there are no computer generated foes you have to fight all of the other players. When they rank up & unlock new abilities, weapons, accessories, etc. they get to use them against everyone. They get the same amount of credit for killing a n00b as for killing a "General". (Maybe not skill points, but experience points)

So you find situations where you have a guy who has never flown a jet before who is going up against people with far superior firepower and he wont have so much as a flare to pop when they get a lock-on and the n00b in question is still learning how to fly...

I've been told "it's only 2 kills" but how do you get those? Lucky shots? That is how I am leveling up at all right now - relying on lucky head-shots for kills.

I have also been told that it is "completely fair" since the old-timers "earned" their gear & the new guys haven't. But when you can't walk & crouch properly -- are struggling to tell the difference between a red triangle & a neon sign or a spark from a burning barrel -- is it really "fair" to go up against seasoned vets with IR scopes?

The reality is that there is a distinct lack of tutorials in this game. You will learn by attrition or you will end up quitting quickly. I am still on the fence & contemplating reselling this game or just giving it away for Xmas... Pity I can't give up the on-line account too.

The idea that I need to play this game for 30 hours before it becomes enjoyable strikes me as going to work for DICE for a whole week & not getting paid for it...

I h8 BF3, SRSLY

2011-12-13T11:09:00.003-05:00

Great graphics, wonderful ballistic science, and a very deep and rich rewards system - those are the kinds of things that people talk about when they discuss Battlefield 3. They talk about how realistic it is and how it is very innovative and the most important thing to happen to the “First Person Shooter” in a long time, et cetera.

These people, like the game itself are pushy and obnoxious people who are going to tell you what opinion you should have and then drill down on you until you come around to their way of thinking - or else you shall be utterly dismissed.

I am not going to say that any of the compliments above are wrong. It’s a lovely game to look at. There is a huge amount of work there and it delivers all of the things that they promised.

Unfortunately the marketing department was bogged down with things like figuring out that the PC version can have 64 players in the same game where the Playstation3 version can only have 24 instead of worrying about whether or not the game is actually fun to play.

According to my profile I have played the game for almost 3 hours. I don’t think that includes the Campaign & Coop modes - only the Multiplayer mode. My intention was to play the Recon “kit” which is theoretically a sniper role, though the gun they give you only kills with a head shot. Since no one is stupid enough to stand still long enough for a sniper to shoot you 3 times I average maybe one kill every 10 minutes. Usually that’s when I switch to the shotgun & blow people’s kneecaps off at point blank range out of sheer frustration.

Now I will mention that the added realism is so realistic that it’s more or less impossible for me to see who I’m supposed to be shooting at. On a high end system with HDTV graphics and insanely great video hardware, I find myself squinting & putting on my glasses to find the 3 square pixel target that pops out of the shrubberies every ten seconds or so that I’m supposed to hit. That it’s light brown against a light brown backdrop with light brown things in front of it is completely overshadowed by all of the random neon signs, flaming barrels and random pieces of garbage flying around in the wind. It’s a nightmare for people displaying any ADHD symptoms.

At one point I ran closer & picked up a machine gun that someone that I killed had dropped. This apparently changed all of the gear that I had to the Support “kit”. To me this is a bit like a wizard picking up a sword & suddenly forgetting all of his spells while sprouting muscles. Unfortunately you still have to know to stick the pointy end into your opponent, proven out by the fact that on no less that 6 occasions I had people successfully run right at me & kill me while I opened fire at them with a machine gun. Then I figured out that I liked the quiet life of the Recon role better.

I’m sure there are lots of people who at this point will rightly point out that I’m a n00b to BF3 so of course I suck, and I’m a n00b to the ‘modern’ FPS game in general (i.e. anything after UnrealTournament) so of course I suck and three hours isn’t enough time to form a proper opinion..... Oh wait. Yes it is. In fact, it’s twice the amount of time that people have to form opinions about ‘modern’ movies. So is the point that I’m supposed to sit through ten episodes of crap before I catch on to the plot of the soap opera or the japanimation dating drama? Are FPS fans just as bad as Oprah loving soccermoms and yaoii fangrrls?

Now we will consider the point that everyone is making over & over & over again... Battlefield3 is “Team Oriented”. I can smell marketing-bullshit when I notice a buzzword mantra being repeated by multiple people aping the PR strategy of the GOP... The phrase “lone wolf” is used with a particular disdain. “If you play like a Lone Wolf, you will not succeed at this game” is one version of the mantra.

I watched & laughed at Farmville. It was so obviously a Ponzi marketing scheme from the onset that I couldn’t bring myself to even try playing it. Get my friends to water my crops? Are you mad!? And yet - I watched while all of those people who won’t play Mario Brothers but who will play Sudoku went bananas over Farmville & the horde of imitators that followed. Thus social media marketing being part of video games was labelled “innovation” and treated like a feature even though it only really was a feature that the company itself benefits from.

Now the herd mentality is being forced upon you as a survival tactic. Battlefield3 doesn’t suggest that you play as a team. It doesn’t make it sub-optimal or simply more difficult to play on your own like World of Warcraft does for example, instead it outright makes it impossible.

Battlefield3 is a team-oriented game even when you play in Single Player Mode. In fact it is worse, because your AI teammates are complete dicks. They will stop to look around and if you stop to look around too they will run off without you seeing where they went. They won’t tell you or anything. They don’t give you helpful directions, they actually just yell at you to keep up. Neither do they usually tell you what you’re waiting around for?

In fact, while working through the campaign, your team actually hoses you over & over. Just about everything they are scripted to say is meant to distract you, startle you, or otherwise keep you from focusing on what you should be doing at the moment. The places that they pick to make a stand are almost always tactically ridiculous and the characters that they play are the sort of people that I wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire.

That they are all window dressing for the basic tutorial on how to wait, walk, wait, crouch, wait, aim, wait, fire, wait, switch weapons, wait, follow the other guy, wait, press the action button, wait, crawl under something, wait, climb over something, wait, drive the vehicle, wait blow up the vehicle, wait, fix the vehicle, this is all too obvious. Did I mention that you spend a lot of time waiting around? (From what I hear about the military, this is realistic.)

Worst of all is the illusion of the open world map. The “edges” of the playable map are not physical obstructions like walls, nor are they virtual ones like an invisible force field. Rather, when you go too far off the edge of the map a countdown for ten seconds begins to warn you to turn around & walk the other way or else you fail the mission. Additionally the simulated voices of your team-mates start yelling at you again.

Thus, the herd mentality as a survival tactic. The message is, if you wander too far away from the group’s objectives, you will die. Is that “fun”?

I’m the only person who is actually thankful that PS3 users generally do not have headsets. If they did then I would have to listen to everyone bitching at me constantly. Trying to have a ‘team based’ game where people can’t communicate with each other is beyond silly - it is disingenuous and biased towards the PC-gamer market.

I like to think that I don’t play against people on PC’s. If I thought that I was - I would likely just throw in the towel & not bother. The idea of trying to aim with a 2cm mushroom joystick and compete with someone using a mouse fills my spleen with fresh adrenaline and makes me want to lash out at the closest living thing and kill it. If I tried to do this in the game however then my vision would go blurry and I would see a bunny-rabbit from the yard pumping me full of lead while I fumbled with the reload button.

Why do I even have this game? Peer Pressure. I peer pressured my best friend into gambling with me on football on Thanksgiving. I fleeced him. Then I pressured him into getting Black Friday discounts on PS3’s on which I spent his money. While we were there a salesman peer pressured him into buying this game. He played it & then he peer pressured me into buying a copy. Now I keep playing because the game itself is peer pressuring me into getting 100 kills so I can get the damned infrared scope!

I actually heard someone say on a podcast video that this game isn’t about killing people it’s about teamwork. That guy needs to join the fucking peace corps. “Deathmatch” is such a popular game mode that there is more than one version. I just play Team Deathmatch so that I have 50/50 odds of getting extra points if my team “wins” and I advance more rapidly. I know not think, know that I am not the only one doing this.

When are video game designers going to figure out that you can have both group and solo play adjacent to each other? People do like to face challenges alone and then come back together in groups & share the experience. Solo players making a temporary alliance based on mutually agreed to goals should always be a viable option too. Why are groups treated with anything like permanence? Why isn’t “my group” simply the people who are with me right now? In this case, it’s an army story, so naturally everyone is going to be on the same side, right? Um no. There is Squad Deathmatch which pits you & 3 others against everyone else.

IMHO this new emphasis on team-play is worse than a shotgun script. It makes for a lack-luster experience for the average user. When the cost of entry is a $300 game system plus a fifty dollar game - the idea that you can’t really have fun unless you go out & recruit all of your friends strikes me as important enough that it should say as much on the box.

For a game that in all reality only truly exists for the Multiplayer mode, the ability to choose what kind of game that you want to play is terrible. In Quick Match mode you can certainly search for the kind of game mode and map that you want to play - but after that one session - you will be put into another game where the settings completely change. This forces you to wait until the next game starts & then you have to quit it & go back to the title screen rather than back to the search screen. Especially as a n00b, it is important that I can keep retrying the same game mode & map over & over until I gain some level of proficiency. Why then must they keep trying to throw me into yet another random situation and then force me to potentially ruin everyone else's game by leaving at the beginning & throwing off their numbers?

Next I want to attack the fact that there are almost no instructions on how to play the game. The manuals are distinctly lacking information on how to operate vehicles and the Campaign mode does not in fact let you use them all. The roles and the “kits” that they carry offer no explanation at all. Instead I have had to learn everything from Blogs and wikis - that & failing my first Coop game in under 10 seconds when I crashed the damned helicopter. Again, this is “fun”?

I can only compare learning to play Battlefield3 with learning to snowboard. You have to experience at least 8 hours of non-stop pain before you can really start having any fun doing it. I am hoping that the payoff is equal though somehow I seriously doubt it. There are other parallels, like waiting around for your friends to catch up and having bragging rights when everyone sees you do something impressive. Maybe if I keep thinking like this I’ll be OK.

But for now, I really fucking hate it.

Home Recording vs. the World

2010-11-01T11:04:00.002-04:00

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.” - Hunter S. Thompson

Having recently anted up and started amassing a collection of Live Audio Recording equipment I have started treading in social circles with whole new rules of exclusivity and elitism.

One of my problems I am sure is that I refuse to be relegated to a particular niche. "Home Recording" is treated as a "hobby" and therefore the "professionals" want little to do with you because you represent a potential threat to their business.

Simply the Idea that you can build a Good Enough studio yourself is something that pro studios do not want you to embrace. That is fair I suppose. Part of it however is the economics. When studio time is extremely expensive, that money could be going towards buying your own gear.

There is some math to that - how often do you really go in the studio? If you had unlimited funds, how much time would you spend there? It's a cost-factor justification to be sure. The "hobby" aspect comes in when you Want To Learn.

That is where another perceived threat to the Pros comes in - people learning their Secrets. The real threat barely exists. Experience is what you need to learn. Pros have it & everyone else is groping for it in the dark. Of course the Idea that you can Learn makes some people undervalue that experience perhaps - so is the threat real?

So the final product? No. The Pros will, on average, steadily outperform the home-studio guys.
The business? Maybe - in that if people think that they can do it themselves they might stop considering Pro services as an option - at least until they hit that brick wall called the Final Product. (see above)

What I do know is that though a $300 microphone doesn't have the same capabilities as a $10k microphone - if you plug it into the rest of the gear that you use with that $300 microphone, you won't get the best performance out of it. You need to upgrade EVERYTHING in the circuit path. Brother, that is expensive. So the pecking order is long indeed.

I also know that you don't need expensive gear to make good music. Stories about the gear that Bo Diddley and his band scrimped up, borrowed or stole so they could play just proves that you can make do with anything in a pinch. It's all about bringing the best you can in a given week.

Halloweenie

2010-10-25T14:47:00.000-04:00

The site got to be a downer. And I just stopped posting.

So...

On the Surface

2010-06-28T09:28:00.005-04:00

This is an animation from CNN that shows the oil that is on the surface and how that has progressed over time.

The big question of course is - how much oil is below the surface? And where is all of that? The whole idea of "dispersants" (with names dripping in spin-doctoring like "Corexit") is to hide the mess by making the oil invisible to the public by making it no longer float.

If you look at the frame from June 8 in particular you will notice a large breakaway swath to the south-east, off of the coast of Florida. Where did that go? Did it retreat back to the main mass or did it "disperse"?

What exactly are the effects of 100 million gallons of oil - "dispersed" in sea-water? Is that considered "cleaned up"?

Real Glimpses of What is Going On

2010-06-07T12:30:00.000-04:00

The images that are now slowing coming out of the cleanup effort are horrific.

What is more, now we are getting revised estimates of the size of the leak that are between 2 - 4 times greater than previously released.

So to revise my previous math - it has now been 48 days. A barrel of oil is 55 gallons. Most people can relate to a gallon jug of milk or water more easily than to a 55 gallon drum that you could easily fit a human body into. Maybe thinking of the drums as coffins is a better metaphor... regardless:
Let us take the average number from the estimate. That is 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. So we will call it 15,500 barrels a day. 15,500 x 48 days = 744,000 barrels x 55 gallons = 40,920,000

Try to picture 40 million gallons of milk in your head.... you can't do it.

So let's go back to bodies - the space required to hold all of that oil will roughly hold 750,000 people. To put that into perspective - at my last count there were something like 130,000 US troops in Iraq and about 100,000 in Afghanistan. So take all of our deployed forces and multiply it by three and you're still not there...

The worst part of all of this was knowing, not thinking, knowing what was going to unfold & not being able to do a damned thing but watch the Gulf of Mexico die in slow motion...

My next prediction is also just horrific - my best guess is that Manatees will be extinct in the wild in <5 years. Where are they going to go & what are they going to eat? They are doomed.

Last Chance to See...

BP and Spin Control

2010-06-03T12:46:00.001-04:00

What I just heard on the radio is too damned upsetting... I had a disclaimer in place here as I researched the links in this post, which is about the people whom are being paid by BP as cleanup workers for the spill in the gulf. But I have since pulled it as the information that I am finding not only backs these claims up, but adds weight to them.

As I understand it, to get hired you must sign a contract that prohibits you from talking to the media under penalty of being fired. So right there - few of the cleanup crews are talking to the media. These are the only people who are legally seeing the spill first-hand since you are otherwise not allowed to take a boat out in the effected areas of the Gulf. In many cases BP is using the local police to chase media crews away from filming oil on the beaches.

The result is as BP intended: precious little first-hand information about the cleanup is getting out.

Secondly, Louisiana Shrimpers Association acting President Clint Guidry has alleged that BP is prohibiting cleanup workers from wearing protective masks. One can only assume this is intended to prevent pictures from being published with such masks being present. While some cleanup workers have grown ill and are blaming it on contact with the chemical dispersants that are being used.
BP has stated that testing has shown that "airborne contaminants are well within safe limits."

Adding credibility to the Guidry's claim after growing ill as a cleanup worker himself, shrimper John Wunstell Jr. has gone so far as to file for a restraining order to stop BP from seizing and destroying worker’s clothes and prohibiting the use of masks. BP's CEO suggested that an alternate cause for his condition was food poisoning.

Disaster in Progress

2010-05-06T09:58:00.002-04:00

It has been 16 days since the explosion that caused the death of 11 people and started the ecological disaster now underway in the Gulf of Mexico. Depending on which estimate you hear from BP the numbers have changed - however the largest number that I heard was 200,000 gallons a day. 200,000 x 16 = 3.2 million gallons. By way of reference the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska was 10.8 million gallons. That spill still hasn't been cleaned up.

The latest news is still the same news - the plan is to attempt to put a dome over the leaking well - like an inverted funnel - that will be used to control the output. This is an extremely risky venture for the people who will be doing it. The pressures involved at that depth are ludicrous. Add to that the pressure of the oil and the gas that caused the original explosion and this is nothing like a business-as-usual situation. There is a fair chance that his will not work - leaving the situation without an announced contingency plan.

The Steve vs. The Flash

2010-05-03T15:26:00.001-04:00

Steve Jobs has some things to say about Flash.

With regards to what he has to say in the first place - sometimes is actually is compelling - but other times, the reality warping field leads to a rhetoric that is somewhat.. broken.

"There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world."

[ahem] Windows [cough] [cough]

I believe that the real problem is what is buried in the 5th point he is trying to make - the only measurable difference:

"Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover."

The interface is so revolutionary that is it missing a feature: "mouse-overs"

"Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?"

For that reason then entire website needs to be rewritten? This is an amazing leap - because HTML5 and JavaScript support mouse-overs too. It is not a Flash-only feature.

I can easily think of a "mode" where you can add a pointer to the screen that looks like a mouse pointer and be required to double-tap in order to "press" a button. Being able to switch on-the-fly would enable you to leverage the best of both UI concepts - the "old" revolution (mouse-based) and the "new" revolutionary UI - multitouch.

It is a simple design compromise and therein lies the reason why it will never happen: The Steve doesn't do compromise.

So if you are a web-designer and you want to use mouse-overs you are out of luck. Forget that they exist in the API. It was a typo. Nothing to see here - move along.

Last Chance to See

2010-05-03T01:25:00.000-04:00

Today (technically yesterday now) was a strange day for me. It was the last day of my vacation and I was in New Orleans. I got up this morning and ate with friends as is our habit for our annual Jazz-Fest pilgrimage.

We ate some of the largest crawdaddies that I have ever seen. We ate turtle soup, shrimp and alligator sausage. Just the other night I we had a few dozen fresh oysters served three different ways,

But I saw on television how the oil that is pouring out of BP's well was threatening landfall on the barrier islands in the high-wind today and I am filled with thoughts of doom. The indigenous wildlife that is the wellspring from which the culture flows is under an assault no less catastrophic than Katrina and it is happening in a time-lapse day to day manner.

As my plane was leaving to come home today we were told by our pilot that Air Force One was taking off and we would be delayed for a period of time. Prior to that the highway that we took to get to the airport was apparently completely shut down about an hour prior to us coming in. I indeed saw two C-5 Galaxys at the airport on the way in.

While it is true that the effort being expended by thousands of workers in the area to lay booms and barriers of many kinds to stop what is being called by BP "sheen" as opposed to "spill" or "slick". [I actually heard one of the BP spokespeople correcting a reporter and shortly thereafter the weatherman on that same local news broadcast was using the 'correct' term.] Still I am extremely concerned that all of this has happened to being with - from the workers losing their lives in the initial explosion of the Deep Horizon oil platform to the impending ecological disaster of the century that will cost the local economy there so very dearly.

How can it be that it was permissible for the risk to exist for a disaster of this magnitude to occur? Is the amount of potential wealth involved so great that they can afford the costs that are going to be involved in truly cleaning this up? How can that be considered to be "OK"? Where is the proper oversight? Do the words "Risk Management" just mean nothing when dealing with this kind of money?

Bring Down IE6

2010-04-08T15:19:00.001-04:00

No really. This is a good idea.

“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.”

- Jeff Zeldman, standards guru

Learning Jython

2010-04-06T16:33:00.000-04:00

In the course of my work I am learning the Jython dialect of the Python programming language.

Rather than spend all that time just teaching it to myself - I thought I would make the journey available to everyone:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfxfgrnv_7dx3pcmgp

I will be updating this shared document over time. So feel free to take the journey with me.

Fun With Phones

2010-04-01T13:57:00.002-04:00

Where U @?

2010-03-15T11:00:00.000-04:00

Apparently "THEY" (i.e. the powers that be) are very interested in exactly "Where U @?"

Surveillance Shocker: Sprint Received 8 MILLION Law Enforcement Requests for GPS Location Data in the Past Year:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/surveillance-shocker-sprint-received-8-million-law

If you ever wanted to know who "THEY" are...

2010-03-08T09:48:00.001-05:00

As a Republican and as a US Citizen I find this extremely embarrassing:

RNC document mocks donors, plays on 'fear'

I am going to own it because I have been saying "Dude, where's my Party" for more than a decade now.

If you were to go around saying that the Republican Party was acting in this way, playing off of people's fears for example - you would be called "Paranoid" at best and at worst a "Conspiracy Theorist" and would promptly be invited to don a tinfoil yamaka.

But if you look at the slide above - that is the first thing on the list to play on when trying to get funds by direct marketing.

So at what point do we point to corporate interests having more sway with politicians than citizens do and slick corporate public relations and marketing being used to further an unpopular agenda with mountains of propaganda in concert with actual military and police brutality being used to quell dissent - when do we start calling it Fascism?

With Great Freedom Comes Great Liability

2010-02-23T11:44:00.000-05:00

Just as you may not shout "Fire" in a theatre during a performance, apparently you may not mouth-off on Twitter for fear of being taken too seriously either.

Given the way that people are taking everything written and blowing it out of proportion to look for some kind of threat in everything - I am starting to understand why Hunter S. Thompson didn't want to live in this world. His outburst-laden style would have had him interrogated on a regular basis.

What is especially weird about this to me is that the simple fact that something was sent as a Tweet - seemed to be the thing that made the authorities take it seriously. If it was some guy making emotional statements in the back of a taxi cab - no one would care. If it was some guy yelling on a sidewalk in New York City - no one would care. If it was an email that was sent from one person to all of his friends - no one would care. But the fact that somehow in the daily tsunami of information that is millions of people tweeting - this guy stood out.

That is a little telling to me. One can infer that there is a mass-search taking place of ALL tweets on a daily basis - and that law enforcement is on the receiving end of that information somehow.

These are Not the Droids you are Looking For...

2010-02-22T09:10:00.001-05:00

Facebook Privacy, Security Fears Grow with Social Network Risks

2010-02-12T09:20:00.000-05:00

"According to a survey of 502 IT professionals by Sophos, businesses are seeing more malware and spam, and 60 percent of respondents put Facebook ahead of MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn as the riskiest social networking site. "

Ahem... "Told ya so"

And So It Begins...

2010-02-02T09:38:00.001-05:00

The breaking news today is that China is telling Obama not to meet with the Dalai Lama.

They are making thinly veiled threats about economic warfare.

To his credit, President Obama held firmly that he absolutely intends to meet with the Dalai Lama.

Keep in mind that the US recently made a deal to sell Taiwan $6.4Billion worth of weapons.

I think this will go much further.

During the Clinton presidency I distinctly remember seeing the First Family sitting in a box in Tiananmen Square watching a military parade and thinking to myself that not even a decade had passed since the massacre and how ashamed I felt for us to sell out the protesters.

Not long after that I distinctly remember freaking out about Chinese war-games off the coast of Taiwan while everyone else worried about where Monica kept her cigars. The one event emboldened China to make the other happen.

Back then everything we bought in terms of electronics was made in Taiwan. In 15 years a lot has changed. Now everything we buy is made in China. They have been engaging in economic warfare against Taiwan for the entire time. China claims Taiwan as it's own 'rogue province'. There is the ever-present threat that they will at some point attempt annexation.

Our own engagement with China during this time has fueled their economic growth and at the same time given rise to Walmart and every other distributor of cheaply manufactured goods. The lure of extremely cheap manufacturing is an addictive force that no large business can apparently resist.

What happens if the kinder & gentler China suddenly "pulls the plug" and goes into a hard-line mode? What if they turn their backs on intellectual property law and instead take all of the designs to the world's most popular gadgets that they have sitting in their factories right now - and take the ball & run with it? What if they put up every piece of software ever written on the internet for free? What if they cashed in all of the treasury bonds that they currently hold all at once? What if they outright invaded Taiwan? How many different ways can they dramatically threaten US interests?

This marks the beginning of a newer and more aggressive phase in Chinese politics. China telling a US President whom he may and may not meet with is audacious at best and outright threatening at worst. That they are willing to make such a move is at the very least a test of resolve.

It is Official - Behold the iPad

2010-01-27T13:13:00.002-05:00

No, really!

You think you're getting one for free from a burning bush? What have you been smoking?

OK OK, you want to type like your father did and not just on the screen? (or maybe that dead spot on your screen is stealing the q's from your documents?)

But don't take my word for it...

Government-made Terror-Mule

2010-01-18T10:44:00.000-05:00

The Slovakian government is completely insane and highly dysfunctional. Apparently they planted enough plastic explosives on an unknowing airplane passenger's luggage to blow that plane out of the sky.

This was supposedly part of a Slovakian government-run "unconventional security operation" where eight different items were planted on people to test if those items were found during airport screening.

It was not found. The seven others apparently were - but not the RDX planted on this particular unnamed traveler.

Interestingly when the Slovakian authorities finally contacted the Irish police - three days later - and told them of the test - they fell on the innocent man unwittingly used as a government mule like ravenous raptors, raiding his apartment in Dublin, arresting him, interrogating him, and charging him with being a terrorist.

The Slovakian government then had to convince to the Irish police of the innocence of the man. Clearly the Irish police took their frustration for being left out of the loop on such an operation out upon the poor man who was used as a stooge by his own government. Remember - after the Slovakian government contacted the Irish police and had already explained the situation they still charged the man in question rather than merely confiscating the explosives.

While the Irish and the Slovakian authorities try to figure out the legality of such tests - it is left for the rest of the Citizens of the World to wonder what our own governments might end up planting in our luggage.

I have, for example, had Italian cookies stolen from my luggage by security inspectors (I had specifically purchased a sealed container for the purpose of travelling home with it & declared it on my paperwork when coming into the country so the word "confiscated" does not apply. They did not inform me of it either.) and I have found an umbrella that was not my own in my luggage after it had been searched - making me wonder how many bags are opened & searched at one time where they can mix up people's property.

The best solution to this problem is the same one I propose for all luggage-related issues when flying : ship your bags ahead of you via Federal Express or UPS. Take nothing on the plane except what fits in your pockets. The baggage handlers/throwers have no respect for your property to begin with and what you are allowed to take onto the plane can shift so rapidly that you will be required to throw your property in the garbage at the security checkpoint. I recently saw a pile of discarded laptop cases for example.

In times of old people used to ship their wardrobes ahead of them in steamer trunks. In the modern age I think that this practice might come into vogue again - if only to minimize the hassle at the security checkpoint.

What is interesting about this practice though is that it actually makes you stand out to the security staff when you travel with no bags. So there is no real 'win win' scenario, but at least if you have no bags your government can not plant things in them without your knowledge.

Welcome to the out-of-control decade

2010-01-15T09:35:00.001-05:00

"Don your tinfoil hat - we're going to take a quick jaunt through a possible future dystopia."

(I think this is a good article - just go read it.)

Chinese Government Hacks Google

2010-01-13T15:22:00.002-05:00

Things are getting pretty serious over at Google with regards to Google.cn . It would seem that there was a large-scale effort to root out dissidents by hacking into Google and up to 20 different companies and the Chinese Government is implicated.

To put this in proper perspective - what you have to look at is simply http://www.baidu.com/ . That is the number one search engine in China, not Google. They are eating Google's cheeze on a large-scale while emulating them across the board. What is interesting is when you crunch the numbers with regards to the number of users. There are a LOT of people in China with computers today.

The implications with regards to human rights and the freedom of speech are very deep indeed. I find this particularly fascinating since most large tech companies today are doing everything that they can to do business with China. Bucking this trend in the name of actual freedoms is a political move that fits perfectly with their original mantra of "Don't Be Evil".

But it has taken them a while to properly define 'Evil' in this context.

Too Many Tweets...

2010-01-05T10:44:00.000-05:00

How many whales does it take to sink an internet startup?

That is the question that the Twitter User Experience team needs to consider.

I really liked twitter. It was as anonymous as you wanted it to be. It could be used with laser-like precision for communicating tons of short updates about just about any damned thing that no one really cares about.

The opt-in/out mechanism is straightforward and the opportunities to game the system are little more than a nuisance.

But how many times do I have to try to tweet & get this stupid message before I just give up?

Worse - how do I depend on this as a professional service for other people to find my information through?

World of Warcraft & Your Privacy

2010-01-04T09:21:00.000-05:00

It would seem that a deputy wrote a subpeona to Blizzard Entertainment asking for information to finger a suspect that that fled to Canada. This was based on information that the suspect that he was looking for actively played World of Warcraft.

It would seem that Blizzard complied enthusiastically and provided among other things, an IP address. That IP address then provided longitude & latitude information in a "search" which was then put into Google Earth to find a street address.

That address was then given to the Royal Canadian Mounties and the Canadian Border Services Agency who deported him. Marshals then picked him up in Minneapolis.

What is interesting here is that the Sheriff that the deputy works for has never seen a "fugitive" located in Canada before. So this is clearly above & beyond what is "normal".

Facebook and Your Privacy

2010-01-01T17:49:00.000-05:00

Recently Facebook implemented some changes to their privacy policy. The intention that they announced was that they wanted to offer you more control of your privacy settings in order to respect your privacy, bla bla bla.

Whatever the reason - they made it extremely easy for you to completely open up your account to EVERYONE by default.

I use a pseudonym on Facebook - so don't bother looking for me unless you actually know me. Even so you might say that I keep the settings on the "most paranoid" mode. But as you can clearly see above - by default they wanted to give out all of my information short of my actual Address. (As though I would actually put it up there?)

You could actually mouse-over the old settings radio buttons & see a popup that displayed what the settings actually were.

But my point is that if you were 'in a hurry' or not willing to read through this carefully - you would find yourself utterly compromised.

I think that this happened to many people recently. It is an observable and testable fact that the majority of people just click through complicated screens in a hurry to get to what they want. With the compulsive nature of Facebook use that happened quite a lot.

Cyber-stalkers of the world rejoice and use this opportunity while it lasts! People will catch on soon enough & change their settings back - but for a little while - anyone whom might have been unavailable to you just might be wide open right now.

Enough is Too Much By Half

2009-12-30T08:33:00.001-05:00

I had the misfortune of travelling internationally this week. That doesn't sound too bad considering that I just went to Canada and it was to spend Christmas at a ski resort. But the problem wasn't the destination or even the journey there. The problem was the trip back.
What happens when a Nigerian Jackass tries to blow off his own testicles on an airplane? The TSA suddenly embarrassed and needing to justify it's existence uses it as an excuse to:

Frisk everyone - including children, with their hands down the back of your pants using the same rubber gloves to touch everyone
Ban ALL carry-on items - leaving thousands of laptops to the mercy of the throwers/baggage-handlers
Not allow anyone out of their seats for one hour prior to landing. Standing up is a crime during that time - either to go to the bathroom or to access the overhead bins.
Change the rules during the process - thereby allowing the first batch through security to keep their laptops but not the cases - which then had to be thrown away on the spot.

At what point to do we, the paying customers, cry 'foul' and draw the line?

Delta airlines has placards posted and pamphlets that they hand out to say that they are not responsible for any property that you lose by 'complying with regulations' - i.e. arbitrary rulings at the security booth are final and you have no recourse to keep your property if they arbitrarily tell you to throw it away.

The Delta pilot went out of his way to lay blame for the 1-hour-in-seat rule on the TSA, Northwest airlines, and the idiot in question - at least 3 times.

If children were required to be frisked to the extent that they did at the airport when they went to school - we would call it Child Abuse. But you are not even allowed to intervene on your children's behalf because you might pose a danger in doing so - in the same way that you may not touch your wallet as they rifle through it.

How all of this benefits the airlines:

More checked bags means more luggage charges
1 hour less cabin service (I watched from first class as my cabin stewardess did crossword puzzles)
No laptops means more sales of in-flight entertainment services on seat-back screens

How to get around this crap:

Charter your own plane - a turbo-prop is $400/hour and a jet is $1,200/hour plus the pilot's time for layovers. This is split across everyone in the plane. There is NO security at all. You leave your shoes on and bring your bags from your car to the plane and no one says anything to you with the exception of the pilot. Money talks and the rich do not suffer the indignities that the peasantry must lightly.
Ship your luggage - for $500 I sent my snowboard bag fully loaded on a round trip from New York, USA to Whistler, Canada. It went through customs without me and was at the hotel when I got there. Zero hassle.

One Month I Want Back

2009-12-22T13:25:00.001-05:00

Many retail-based businesses in America experience their peak sales period during the Judæo-Christian "Holiday Season". As a result it seems as though every year some wishfully thinking business-people are responsible for trying to extend that season.

"Traditionally" the shopping season starts the day after Thanksgiving in America. This is because unless you're working in retail - you have a day off to go shopping. In my opinion if you have any sanity you do anything BUT go shopping that day if only because that is when it will take the most of your time standing check-out in lines.

It is also the day that it is considered 'acceptable' to start playing Christmas-music in the stores.

However this year I saw attempts at selling Christmas-related merchandise immediately-after-if-not-overlapping Halloween!

I heard on the radio this morning a DJ quoting a 'fact' that 70% of Americans still haven't begun Christmas shopping today - and it is December 22nd. i.e. 3 days before you are supposed to be giving these gifts.

If this is indeed a Fact - then no amount of lead-time is going to improve your sales. Indeed I would think that shoving Christmas down everyone's throats too early has the opposite effect from that intended. I know that I personally will walk out without buying anything if I have to suffer through too many of those torturous ditties while being forced to wait before being allowed my turn to fork over my currency.

So I say to all Marketing People - research this. PLEASE. I, and many like me, find these "Holidays" a tiresome burden. If you can find any truth in this - may we please get that month of our lives back?

My theory for this pattern of behavior is not one of laziness as much as one of managing your funds. Have you ever noticed how eager bill-collectors are at this time of year and the threatening tone that regular bills take on? I think most adults are used to this cycle by now and have adapted to the idea of holding on to as much money as you can for as long as you can & then when you know everything is taken care of - only then do you go and spend whatever meager savings you have left.

Go.... fish?

2009-12-18T11:22:00.004-05:00

Google has a new experimental programming language that they are calling "go". The problem is that for the last 10 years there already is a language with that name, or more precisely "Go!"

Now I don't know about you but my semantic filter fails to see a capital letter and a punctuation mark as creating a new word - in any case.

The joke is "Google didn't Google for Go before using the name". But the sad truth is that I have read some troll-like comments from clueless & disrespectful people who think that Fame-makes-Right and that brand the work of McCabe as "little known", etc. in a dismissive way. (Someone introduces it using those very words in the Wikipedia article on the subject)

I don't care that Google has a lot more money than Francis McCabe - it does not supercede his usage of the name for a programming language. He has even published a book on the subject. If they want the name that badly they should have to part with some of it to compensate the man for a decade's worth of his life put into something they are stepping on.

McCabe's problem seems to be that he did not Trademark the name. The question stands "is what Google is doing here considered to be 'Evil'? "

Robot Arms Race

2009-12-15T14:33:00.001-05:00

I have noticed that there is a sort of arms race between online games and people who leverage the power of macros. Anything that you can automate in a game can be performed on the user's end via automation - in theory.

The reason for this is simple - game providers charge a fee to use their systems. They built the game & they want to be the ones to make money from it. People who can automate playing the game can 'farm' for the rewards handed out from playing. Sometimes this is called 'gold farming'. It can be for anything that is freely exchangeable between multiple players in a mutually shared on-line game world. Often the objective is to exchange those wonderfully coveted prizes for actual real-world currency.

This is behavior is not limited to games. Using automated scripts/macros/bot-programs to access web pages & follow links is a business unto itself. This is because online advertising works on two tiers - click-throughs and conversions. Just clicking on an ad makes somebody a fraction of a cent. Actually buying something after clicking through gets a lot more. The difference between those two prices is actually because of people using scripts. Since you can write a script to click on an ad link all day - it devalues that ad.

The captcha is one development in this arms race. However, there is commercial software that can defeat this with OCR out there. So if you can do this often and effectively enough to pay for your computers, an internet connection & some fancy specialized software and still clear a profit on top of it - then this might be for you.

Randomization seems to lie at the heart of every method to trying to subvert any automated script.

World of Warcraft does this kind of thing with activities like fishing - where it requires human interaction to respond to the random location on the screen and timing when your little float bobs so that you have to click on it. That way you can't walk away & let your computer fish all day. You could do it yourself - but you would have to sit there getting bleary-eyed, pale & fat doing so all day. Odds are that you can't support yourself and your family on selling virtual fish without a little help.

Kingdom of Loathing being wholly web-based is far more susceptible to this sort of thing and deals with it by randomizing combat results. Other popular web-based games do something similar.

Your Privacy Evaporating : One Day At A Time

2009-11-09T13:51:00.004-05:00

November 5th, 2009 - Developer find major Coding Errors in Facebook & MySpace, Massive Facebook and MySpace Flash Vulnerability Exposes User Data

February 23rd, 2009 - Facebook Scam, an Example of Identity Fraud

February 12th, 2009 - Security Breach : Facebook hit by Spammers

May 1st, 2008 - Identity 'at risk' on Facebook

March 27th, 2008 - Hackers Break into Facebook

March 25th, 2008 - Facebook security lapse allows Paris Hilton pictures to be leaked, Facebook security breach exposes private photos

July 31st, 2007 - Facebook security glitch exposes user in-boxes

Facebook/Mugbook

2009-10-30T09:34:00.002-04:00

Modern Propaganda - Your Tax Dollars At Work

2009-10-23T14:23:00.000-04:00

PSYOPS aka Psychological Warfare aka Information Manipulation is something that is actively being pursued by the American government, intelligence, and military institutions. What is disturbing is not that it is being aimed at enemies. It is that our allies are also being actively targetted.

Millions of dollars have been handed out in the form of government contracts for creating tens of thousands of websites and even cell phone edutainment games.

The real question is of course would any of this be truly effective in any way other than perhaps being construed as a spamming campaign / denial of service attack / watering-down of the accuracy of search engines and information sources?

Would this actually have any real effect beyond that which commercial enterprise has achieved so far?

"Creation" doesn't fly in the USA

2009-10-21T16:58:00.001-04:00

Apparently there was a film made about Charles Darwin in the UK called "Creation" and for a while there they were not able to find a distributor in the USA because the Theory of Evolution is considered 'too controversial' in this country...

To put the spotlight on this opinion - here is the results of a poll taken in February of this year:

What kills me about this is how easy it is to come across people who are actively spamming pseudo science and top-loading search engines to drive people to their nonsense.

Notice how this works - the movie is made and people are watching it all around the world - but someone with money and an agenda are blocking the distribution of a film in this country about the history of science.

We can have movies about zombies and vampires and killer robots and fictional para-military forces made by scientologists where guns are fired constantly but if you want to do a think-piece about a scientist whose theory is completely proven out by the subsequent discovery of DNA -- that is too "controversial"? (And since when is controversy bad for a film?)

That same DNA evidence is submittable in court mind you. The same courts where the Scopes trial took place.

Mind you - they did eventually find a distributor:

[From Wikipedia:]
According to Jeremy Thomas, the United States was one of the last countries to find a distributor due to the prominence of the Creation–evolution controversy.^[4] On September 24, 2009,Variety reported that Newmarket Films acquired the rights to the movie and plans to release it in December in the US.^[6]

Big Brother Pretty Useless

2009-10-21T15:24:00.002-04:00

London has a lot of video cameras. Maybe Las Vegas comes close - but the majority of those are privately owned. London's cameras are run by the state.
So you would think that having them all be coordinated would lead to solving a lot of crime, no?

Um no.

1,000 CCTV cameras to solve just one crime, Met Police admits

Virtual Wires

2009-10-09T10:23:00.000-04:00

The word of the day is Beamforming.

It was a new one for me this morning - and I don't like falling behind the curve on new technology - so I took a few minutes to learn something new:

Beamforming is a specialized method of antenna-based RF transmission. Essentially is has to do with selectively using/timing different antennas or frequency bands in order to aim the transmission/reception either physically or virtually at the source/target you are most interested in.

This is different from the concept of omni-directional transmission/reception that most of us are familiar with. You can think of it in a way as the concept of a satellite dish pointing at a fixed location instead of a pair of rabbit-ears trying to listen to everywhere at once. Only in this case - the dish would be self-aiming.

Originally developed for sonar applications - it found another application in cellular networks and is now being introduced for wireless networking. Expect to hear more of this buzzword in the near future.

5 Y's & 2 ToDo's

2009-10-07T15:21:00.001-04:00

Have you ever wondered why your manager might sometimes talk to you like a little kid obsessed with the word "Why?" ...

There is a problem solving method that asks you to do just that.

Which is a pretty good idea when you think about it - as annoying as that can be when you are on the receiving end of it. (A little humility and an open mind can go a long way in those times.)

But finding out why is worthless if you're not going to do something about it. In fact you really need to do two things about it.

I think the true wisdom in these approaches though is the idea of solving problems iteratively.

What I mean by this is that usually when you have a Really Big Problem^TM - it is going to take a lot of time & effort to fix - usually because it took a long time to create the problem. That is to say, that the problem itself was created iteratively - one uninformed/bad decision compounding the others growing over time.

If you have systemic problems like that - it is perhaps best to solve those problems iteratively also. An hour's effort here and there compounded over time can achieve meaningful results without necessarily getting in the way of General Progress^TM.

It also has the effect of assigning more realistic priorities to things. If you spend an hour working on the root cause every time that you have a recurring problem - the problems that occur most often will end up getting the most cumulative attention instead of those that perhaps are perceived as being more important.

The 'Right Way' to Start a Company...

2009-10-06T08:07:00.000-04:00

The Stuff of Snowboarder Nightmares

2009-10-05T12:20:00.000-04:00

Avalanche Skier POV Helmet Cam Burial & Rescue in Haines, Alaska from Chappy on Vimeo.

GT-10B in Depth

2009-10-05T09:37:00.000-04:00

I have had some time to spend with my new toy now.

So here are a few words on the subject:

All in all it makes me wonder why I waited so long. This is a game-changer. The overall impact this has on how I do things now is significant.

In terms of gizmoes all strung together and glued/screwed/taped/velcroed to a piece of plexi-glass/wood/padded-custom-case & then running into the amp... I'm done - for quite a while I think. It pretty much has every stomp-pedal that BOSS ever made for bass in there more or less. You can use them in whatever order/combinations you like - and SAVE those combinations. This allows a lot more creativity in a live situation in terms of getting your effects together between/during songs.

It is also Really Easy. That is how it was sold to me & it does not disappoint. Neither do I find it to be as condescending as it might be. The EZ Tone thing for creating a sound borders on that - but how often would anyone use that after getting to know how to use the thing?

In terms of sound processor though -- niice -- I plugged it into my PowerBook via the USB cable & driver software & ran it simply through Garageband as the sound input and output - and plugged my headphones into the GT-10B for the session. WOW. It upgraded the experience tremendously. I even banged out a new song the first night I sat down with it. (Just imagine when I hook it up to some real editing software)

Add that last bit to the ability to back up/restore/mix&match all of the patches that you create via that USB cable to the computer - and now you have a professional situation where you can buy a replacement on the road & get on with the show with very little effort.

And of course - The Sound ... It is really very nice. It is also very easy to be cheezy - particularly with the pitch-shifter - so beware. Hard as is it to imagine - I could see potentially just running through a PA system (with the appropriate monster subwoofers) because you can make the sound exactly what you want.

No they don't come out & say it - but there is clearly modelling of Ampeg, Orange, etc. in there. It makes a difference.

Nothing Wastes Time Like "Crunch Time"

2009-09-23T10:20:00.000-04:00

Why is it that in the middle of every major software development project that I have ever been a part of there is a point that is reached where management panics, throws out the original plan and starts shooting from the hip?

The one thing that no one ever seems to try to include in their schedules is Problems. As developers we create them, find them and face them every day. Most are little problems that can be worked out with some analysis, patience and research. Some are serious mind-benders that require rotating people in and out of the effort to find the answer to them. And some are like Inventing a Light Bulb.

What I mean by that is that Edison had to experiment over and over and over to find the right filament in order to make a commercially viable light bulb. He measured his success in the effort by how many things he successfully disqualified from being the answer.

When software developers 'slip' a deadline - it is more often than not one that was forced on them artificially in the first place by backing into a date based on some delivery expectation that has little to do with the actual work itself. Any work estimate is just that - an estimate - and does not include delays caused by "things that we don't know that we don't know". By definition it can't be. You can estimate time required to learn things that you are aware that you don't know - but the questions, implications and problems that come out of learning that is unknowable until you take that next step.

Therefore the pursuit itself it wrought with inherent disappointment if you are in a hurry to get your software done. For this reason the only thing that makes sense it to develop everything iteratively. One small step at a time. It is good to have goals - but the results of an iteration should be modest and should never be overloaded to try to reach an artificial goal.

Metal Gear Music

2009-09-08T08:36:00.005-04:00

I finally caved in and bought a Boss GT-10B yesterday. I have to say that it really does sound nice. I almost like it better through the headphones it sounds so nice. I am an old fan of multi-effects units, so I took to it right away. It is pretty amazing what you can do to your sound with one of these things.

I only started messing around with the loop feature last night but as a bass player it's very handy and relatively simple to use.

In actual news - the Dethklok album and new season is about to drop and the tour is underway.

Also Iggy Pop has a new album out called Preliminaries. It is New Orleans style jazz with him singing in french. That concept might scare you off - but from what I have heard it is pretty awesome actually.

A Work of Fiction

2009-08-28T09:16:00.003-04:00

This is actually not one email - but a composite of several - so it's a bit like text-collage art :

Dears,

Looping all...

This is not good. Lets be very careful while implementing any functionality, specially when it is a big change. We must follow the QC properly.

We have a critical issue in environment in order to fix this we need to make web deployments urgently. can you please help us on this.

It is going up & down...

Can you help immediately...

Please do the needful.

Also we need to discuss on the folowing points:

I am not sure which query of SoAndSo report are you expecting from me?

Is it meant for SomeOtherSoAndSo?

Regards,

- SoAndSoWhoMustNotBeNamed

They call it H1N1 now...

2009-08-20T17:11:00.001-04:00

Memetics

2009-08-12T10:17:00.004-04:00

I have been told by someone that not only am I the only person that they know who has ever used the word "meme" but that I tend to use it in a sentence at least once a day.

Today I am going to run with that.

By way of definition I will call a meme a self-replicating unit of information stored in the brain.

Richard Dawkins put forth an idea that "Selfish Genes" use living bodies as vehicles and factories for self-replication.

If you want to be a goofy sci-fi nerd about it - think of it like the damned Midichlorians using us for raw material.

But if you want to look at it another way - you might say that it is more accurate to say that in fact we are far more condusive to be vehicles for memes. In fact, Dawkins put this idea forth himself since he is credited for coining the term.

There is an additional way to look at this however that he did not touch on. While you can apply the concept of selective pressure and evolution to ideas and meme also, there are things that memes are capable of that genes are not. Everyone knows that ideas spread from person to person. But there is another far more profound ability - Memes can jump species.

A person can watch animals hunt for food and can learn how to do the same thing. A chimp or a gorilla can be taught things like sign-language and the concept of zero. A dog can respond to voice commands. Wild dogs in Russia have learned to commute by train.

Memes also seem to have wars. It might be argued that all organized human warfare is in fact a product of memes. But what I mean by saying that memes have wars is that one can evolve that as a condition for it's existence is mutually exclusive of another. "Religious Wars" are a prime example of this type of memocide - where a set of ideas inherent in one set of individuals is forcibly purged by another set of individuals holding a different set of ideas.

How much more deeply are we enslaved by our own ideas than we are by our genetic makeup? The only real upside is that memes evolve several orders of magnitude faster than genes. You are 'free' to change your mind as you will. But will you? Can you? Do you ever go out of your way to 'change' your mind? Why are we all so inclined to "believe" rather than to "think"?

Is it because it is safer for us or for our memes?

Scala is pretty Groovy after all

2009-08-11T11:43:00.003-04:00

It seems that Scala got a resounding review from the originator of Groovy, James Strachan.

I am a great fan of the concept of the Java Virtual Machine. I think that the ability to have multiple languages producing a common byte-code format produces some very powerful benefits. In essence you can have one project or multiple projects running in a common environment where code resources written in different languages can interact with each other and not be dependent on any one particular hardware infrastructure. In fact you could run your code on many different types of hardware and achieve clean interaction between them all.

That includes Java, Scala, Jython, JRuby, Clojure, Groovy, Rhino, Quercus, and many other programming languages.

That greatly simplifies the development process. Anything that makes complicated things simple without losing the power inherent in the complexity is OK in my book.

At the risk of ostracising myself on PerlMonks - I am of the opinion that perl 6 bet the farm on rolling their own virtual machine. While I know that historically speaking the JVM was not remotely open when the perl 6 effort began and what is more there was not much support for any language besides java on the JVM - but much has changed in the many years that perl 6 has languished in it's Duke-Nukem-Forever-style development cycle.

I would love to see someone implement perl on one of the open JVM platforms that exist in prove that it can be done and kept open. I would welcome it as a first step towards implementing it on the actual JVM - which is used in many many many production environments around the world.

I know that a large contingent of the perl community habitually throws stones at Java - but I belong to the subset of developers that are interested in perl and Java for the same reason - developing code with platform independence.

Shocking and Awful

2009-08-05T08:22:00.005-04:00

There is quite a bit of noise about the release of the would-be summer blockbuster, G.I. Joe. But it's not the kind that we usually hear about. The story isn't about how good or bad the movie is. It isn't about the lines of people camping out to see it.

This story is about the marketing strategy of "thumbing your nose at sophisticates".

Apparently Paramount has spent $US150 Million advertising this movie to Middle America - completely bypassing "the coasts". Considering that the movie cost $US175 Million to make - that is a lot like doubling down when you're losing at the craps table.

They are hedging their bets by not allowing reviewers to see the movie in advance like most normal movies. However, over 1,000 servicemen and their families however got to see it last Friday. This might be based on the solitary bad review that the trailer received from a blogger, that triggered a bogus and wishful cease & desist order from Paramount's lawyers.

One Manhattan-centric voice, i.e. New York Magazine summed it up in 15 words on their Approval Matrix: "Lovers of hilariously mean movie reviews mourn as G.I. Joe will not screen for critics"

Most telling is the way that Sienna Miller, a star of the movie itself, has made multiple damning comments and even an accusation about the making of this summer "tentpole".

If you are planning on attending the Kid Rock/Lynyrd Skynyrd tour - you will get your ample dosage of G.I. Joe, whether you like it or not.

This is target-marketing at it's ugliest. But if you love country music or NASCAR, odds are you have never read a movie review and hate all things sophisticated, and so if I trash you at the end of this blog entry - you'll never even notice. It's a bit like trashing the Amish on-line - how would they ever know? But then again no one whom is Amish ever threatened anyone that I know. "I'm gunna kick yer ass" however is like a cowboy mantra, isn't it?

Still, I would suggest that you spend that $12 on another batch of Skoal instead of this waste of celluloid. It will last longer and might contribute favorably to the natural selection that you don't believe in anyway.

Line6 Follow-Up

2009-07-24T10:37:00.005-04:00

So in a sense of fairness I got a hold of the User's Manual for the Line6 Bass PodXT Live and combed it for uncoolness.

I got rattled when they went rule-head on me with this:

1. Obey all warnings on the POD XT Live and in this Pilot’s Handbook.

But the only thing that I read about volume levels was actually phrased in a way that made it seem like they cared about you and not necessarily the people around you first:

8. Prolonged listening at high volume levels, especially with headphones, may cause irreparable hearing loss and/or damage. Always be sure to practice “safe listening.”

Note that the suggestion that Roland offered was to do exactly the thing that Line6 is warning you about - listening to loud music through headphones.

The way that I choose to interpret "safe-listening" in this context is to wear ear-plugs on stage and crank it up for the world to hear. Incidentally, if I find myself with front-row tickets I think they're a wise move too.

Interestingly this unit has a sweet-spot setting for the Bose PS1 Cylindrical Radiator™ which I find very interesting technically. I have been told by a beautiful woman that I trust however that they are not sexy.

I will say this - Line6 writes a far better manual than Roland. I think the proof is in the sound though... I guess I will have to harrass some poor salesman into letting me try them both. That sounds like an ordeal for us both.

'Reasonable' Rock & Roll

2009-07-22T13:37:00.006-04:00

I am interested in buying a multi-effects unit for my bass. I narrowed it down to two contenders:

Line6 PODxtLive or Roland GT-10B

I was pretty much sold on the Roland unit and have been saving my pennies to pick one up. But I was reading the Owner's Manual & I came across this little nugget that just bent me out of shape:

To avoid disturbing your neighbors, try to keep the unit’s

volume at reasonable levels. You may prefer to use

headphones, so you do not need to be concerned about

those around you (especially when it is late at night).

What kind of corporate liability lawyer dreamed up that bizarre bit of legal advice? There are multiple settings in the device specifically designed for the playing of Hard Rock and Heavy Hetal music, amongst others. What are they thinking!?

Whatever happened to "This goes to eleven"!?

I suppose to be fair I need to check the Line6 copy next...

iTunes Uses "Pentium Math"

2009-07-22T09:44:00.007-04:00

I am sure that there is some kind of technical explanation for this one, but whatever it is - the UI designers gave me a laugh:

But what is one ridiculous message when two in a row can make you keep scratching your head?

Dropping the Ballmer

2009-07-21T16:24:00.003-04:00

If you are a Micro$oft stock-holder - I suggest that you start a vote of no-confidence against your CEO.

I love to lampoon this guy - because he makes it so easy.

But honestly, just because you were Bill's sidekick does not mean that you have the tenacity of vision that Bill Gates does.

Here is the latest dippy thing that he had to say about a serious subject that strikes at the heart of the M$-Ca$h-Cow:

Ballmer on Google Chrome OS: “Who Knows What That Thing Is”

I am pretty sure that a lot of people know what it is - and what is more they are very interested in it. I know that I am.

The fog of multi-generational FUD is starting to clear as the blogging-generation grows up. No more will the middle-class buying dollars be swayed from their techno-toys by silly mud-slinging.

How do I mock thee? Let me count the ways:

Vista - an industry-wide joke that even Jerry Seinfeld couldn't make funny
Zune - a pathetic also-ran
X-Box - never turned a profit
X-Box360 - this product dumping thing is expensive! Still never turned a profit
Sync - You can't keep your OS from crashing and you want to put it in my car!?
MSN - An online service that no one paid for that became a brand name for awful TV channels

What exactly has come out of Redmond since he's been at the helm that is worth anything?

My Next Phone?

2009-07-21T08:27:00.002-04:00

This is tasty...

Now that Pandora is coming for Android I just might end up with something like this as my next phone.

What You Weren't Allowed To Know...

2009-07-20T09:24:00.003-04:00

...Unitl after the election...

I don't know which is funnier - the meat of this story or the repeated use of the ?word? "Knowledgeability"... (Isn't the proper word 'knowledgable' - used as an adjective? You guys were communications majors, surely you do not need to butcher the English language in this way?)

Oh here we go again - How about simply using the word "Knowledge"...

Dude, Where's My Party?

2009-07-17T15:17:00.003-04:00

Is is unforgivable quotes like this that make me ashamed of the Republican party:

"I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." - George H.W. Bush

"We don't have to protect the envionment, the Second Coming is at hand" - James Watt, former Secretary of the Interior

Do you see me using the word 'polemicist' at the top of this blog? Let me be clear - I have nothing in common with the likes of Ann Coulter. No one would pay any attention to that twit if she wasn't somewhat attractive. At the time of my writing this - she is 47. I can't wait until she hits the wall and is squelched into irrelevancy.

Let me be clear about this:

The reason why I am a Republican is because I believe in small & limited government. I want the government out of my life and off of my property. The religiously intolerant Fundamentalist Christians¹ whom have hijacked the party and are constantly trying to extend the influence of law into the wombs of women are completely out of control and need to be kept in check.

In New York state you must belong to a party in order to participate in the Primaries. I believe that change is best effected from within - so I participate. But I disagree with almost everything that my fellow Republicans seem to be for these days.

GWB expanded the federal government more in his first term than Clinton did in both of his terms. It took a jackass like him to make a weasel like Bill Clinton look good.

I miss the prosperity of the 90's in the worst possible way.

But neither do I forgive the Democrats for their complacency while the proverbial excrement was hitting the rotating blades.

IMHO the American people now expect politicians to be utterly corrupt and forgive them for it. I want you to think about that because it means that you are giving a shooting license to Ceasar. It only took 8 years for the Greatest Country In The World to drag the global economy down with it.

Now ask yourself - what, if anything, is getting better?

¹ Fundamentalist Christianity - because bothering to believe in ALL of it is a lot of work, and that Love Thy Enemy stuff must be some Hippie Nonsense, right?

A Plea to All iPhone Developers

2009-07-17T15:06:00.002-04:00

FACT: iPhones get dead-spots on their screens

Most people that I know who have them have a dead spot somewhere. Mine is a line about 1cm tall extending across the screen.

If you have a button on the screen somewhere, someone is likely to never be able to press it.

There is a simple answer to this:

ROTATION, ROTATION, ROTATION!

Please Please Please support rotation in your applications whenever possible. If I can flip the screen around then I can get all of the buttons in any app to work.

Freedom of Speech is not Freedom from Spam

2009-07-15T14:10:00.002-04:00

I am the sort of person who can withstand the constant onslaught of slings & arrows from critics and detractors alike.

But if you are going to comment on a posting - please do not use it as a forum to post nothing but links to yourself. Please write an actual comment.

I was apparently link-spammed by the author of tradeskillsllc.blogspot.com (Happy with your link now?) or someone using their account who posted a comment including all of the text of their two most recent blog entries. These had nothing to do with the posting it was 'commenting' on at all. I am going to delete it.

If you want to debate a topic & tell me that I'm a shitwit - that it one thing. As long as you are vaguely on-topic I will not so much as moderate. But blatant self-advertising is just rude and a waste of time for the few people who read this blog. I am for free-speech. But if you just want to shout out your name, go stand on a NYC street-corner & start rappnig free-style or something and get off of my lawn.

A Blogspot Feature

2009-07-14T15:24:00.002-04:00

It would seem that if I am going to meditate a little longer on a blog entry that I need to finish it before moving on to the next one. I added 2 new postings today that had been brewing for some time now - but they appeared chronologically not in the order in which they were 'published' but rather in the order in which they were created.

I suppose I will need to be a little better about that kind of thing from now on!

Wordle Snapshot

2009-07-14T13:35:00.002-04:00

Occasionally I take a snapshot of my blog using Wordle.

Here is the latest version:

Video Games vs. Violent Crime

2009-07-13T16:06:00.003-04:00

I apologize for the stupid pop-up ad. Just close the window & come back to watch the video.

Hubba Hubba Huh?

2009-07-13T13:53:00.004-04:00

Aaaand my nomination for the worst technology name of the year is ...

pubsubhubbub!?

How to Share Photos without Facebook

2009-07-13T12:12:00.004-04:00

A number of people that I know seem to think that you need to use Facebook to share photographs.

In fact many people outright refuse to share photos with me unless I join.

These are mostly the same people who had that same attitude about MySpace 2 years ago.

Well - for those of you who can't handle email attachments for some reason and are too frightened by your own computer to turn on the built-in web-server that everyone has now.... Try one of these:

http://www.flickr.com/

http://picasa.google.com/

http://photobucket.com/

Sarah Palin – The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

2009-07-13T10:57:00.013-04:00

[ADHD WARNING: This is a LONG post & the good stuff is at the end]

Following the ‘disjointed rambling’ that was her 2,700+ word resignation speech, I took the time to sit down & thoroughly research the history of Sarah Palin. Being a fellow Republican (dude, where’s my party?) and a Scientist (I neither thump nor burn books, I read them) – I thought I would try to be as fair as possible in presenting a picture of this person whom has been a lightning rod for attention for the last two years.

From that, I give you the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Sarah Palin. The Good reflects the hard-earned accomplishments of someone who has worked hard & deserves to be proud. The Bad reflects poor decisions and failures – and to be fair who doesn’t make those – but that which one should be regretful about and learn from. The Ugly however is that which is neither to be forgotten nor forgiven and what makes this politician truly dangerous and a shameful embarrassment to Alaska and America.

Many of the events listed in one section end up reappearing in another section – so I have attempted to link these with footnote references.

Full disclosure – I did not vote for McCain in the last election. I did vote for him in favor of Bush in the 2000 New York Primary.

Good:

Elected twice to the city council of Wasilla, in 1992 and 1995 & was a member of from 1992 to 1996¹
Served two terms (1996–2002) as the mayor of Wasilla
First female governor of Alaska
Youngest person elected governor of Alaska
First Alaskan candidate of either major party on a national ticket²
First female vice-presidential nominee of the Republican Party²
Head of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter at the school³
Captain and point guard of the school's girls' basketball team that won the Alaska state championship in 1982
Winner of the Miss Wasilla Pageant in 1984³
Finished third in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant, which earned her a college scholarship⁴ and the "Miss Congeniality" award
Returned to the University of Idaho in January 1986, where she spent three semesters completing her bachelor's degree in communications-journalism, graduating in May 1987 ⁴
During her first year in office, Palin kept a jar with the names of Wasilla residents on her desk, and once a week she pulled a name from it and picked up the phone; she would ask: "How's the city doing?" Using income generated by a 2% sales tax that was enacted before she was elected to the city council, Palin cut property taxes by 75% and eliminated personal property and business inventory taxes
Elected president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors.
Chaired the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission from 2003 to 2004
After resigning from the AO&GCC, Palin filed a formal complaint against Oil and Gas Conservation Commissioner Randy Ruedrich, also the chair of the state Republican Party,accusing him of doing work for the party on public time and of working closely with a company he was supposed to be regulating
She also joined with Democratic legislator Eric Croft to file a complaint against Gregg Renkes, a former Alaskan Attorney General, accusing him of having a financial conflict of interest in negotiating a coal exporting trade agreement, while Renkes was the subject of investigation and after records suggesting a possible conflict of interest had been released to the public. Ruedrich and Renkes both resigned and Ruedrich paid a record $12,000 fine.
Palin followed through on a campaign promise to sell the Westwind II jet, a purchase made by the Murkowski administration for $2.7 million in 2005 against the wishes of the legislature.
In December 2008, an Alaska state commission recommended increasing the Governor's annual salary from $125,000 to $150,000. Palin stated that she would not accept the pay raise. In response, the commission dropped the recommendation
Helped in her husband’s commercial fishing business^{7 [This isn't all that he does however]}

Bad:

Unsuccessful campaign for Lieutenant Governor of Alaska in 2002
Republican Party's vice-presidential nominee for the 2008 United States presidential election²
Announced that she will not be a candidate for re-election in 2010 and that she would resign the Office of Governor effective July 26, 2009
Enrolled at Hawaii Pacific College in Honolulu. She left after one semester ⁴
Transferred to North Idaho College, a community college in Coeur d'Alene and spent two semesters as a general studies major in 1983 ⁴
August 1984, she transferred to the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho ⁴
After two semesters at UI, Palin returned to Alaska and attended Matanuska-Susitna College, a community college in Palmer, for one term in the fall of 1985 ⁴
Did not complete her second term on the city council because she ran for mayor in 1996¹
The first governor not to be inaugurated in Juneau; she chose to have the ceremony held in Fairbanks instead. ⁶
Palin promoted oil and natural gas resource development in Alaska, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge(ANWR).
In 2006, Palin obtained a passport and in 2007 traveled for the first time outside of North America on a trip to Kuwait. [She was the only Vice Presidental candidate in history to have never met a foreign head of state. That she never even travelled out of the USA at all prior to 2007 is shameful for someone whom would potentially preside over foreign policy matters]
In June 2007, Palin signed a record $6.6 billion operating budget into law. At the same time, she used her veto power to make the second-largest cuts of the construction budget in state history. The $237 million in cuts represented over 300 local projects, and reduced the construction budget to $1.6 billion. In 2008, Palin vetoed $286 million, cutting or reducing funding for 350 projects from the FY09 capital budget.
Palin also joined with nearby communities in jointly hiring the Anchorage-based lobbying firm of Robertson, Monagle & Eastaugh to lobby for federal funds. The firm secured nearly $8 million in earmarked funds for the Wasilla city government. Earmarks included $500,000 for a youth shelter, $1.9 million for a transportation hub, and $900,000 for sewer repairs.However in 2008 Alaska was still the largest per-capita recipient of federal earmarks, requesting nearly $750 million in special federal spending over a period of two years
She opposes same-sex marriage and supported a non-binding referendum for an Alaskan constitutional amendment to deny state health benefits to same-sex couples ³
Palin has called herself "as pro-life as any candidate can be" and has called abortion an "atrocity." ³
Palin has stated that abortion should be banned in nearly all cases, including rape and incest, except if the life of the mother is endangered.³
Palin has stated that she does not support embryonic stem cell research. ³
Governor Murkowski appointed Palin to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. She chaired the Commission beginning in 2003, serving as Ethics Supervisor. Palin resigned in January 2004, protesting what she called the "lack of ethics" of fellow Republican members.⁵

Ugly:

She promoted an effort to de-list the polar bear as an endangered species, since this could hinder oil searching ⁷
In 2007, Palin supported a 2003 Alaska Department of Fish and Game policy allowing the hunting of wolves from the air as part of a predator control program intended to increase moose and caribou populations for subsistence-food gatherers and other hunters. In March 2007, Palin's office announced that a bounty of $150 per wolf would be paid to the 180 volunteer pilots and gunners, to offset fuel costs, in five areas of Alaska. Six-hundred-and-seven wolves had been killed in the prior four years. State biologists wanted 382 to 664 wolves killed by the end of the predator-control season in April 2007. Wildlife activists sued the state, and a state judge declared the bounty illegal on the basis that a bounty would have to be offered by the Board of Game and not by the Department of Fish and Game.⁷
Palin stated in 2006 that she would not allow her personal religious beliefs to dictate her political positions³
Her father, Charles R. Heath, was a science teacher
Member of the girls' cross country team [her father was the coach]³
1988, she worked as a sports reporter for KTUU-TV and KTVA-TV in Anchorage ³
Worked at the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman as a sports reporter [You wonder where all the sports metaphors come from?] ³
On the City council, she successfully opposed a measure to curtail the hours at Wasilla's bars by two hours. This surprised her opponent Hartrick because she was then a member of a church that advocated abstinence from alcohol. [I actually agree with her legal stance but it is the hipocrisy that raises questions. She clearly cherry picks where to apply Beliefs to the Law] ³
She introduced abortion, gun rights, and term limits as campaign issues [i.e. these were not issues Alaskans based their votes on previously - Wedge Stratregy anyone?]
Shortly after taking office in October 1996, Palin consolidated the position of museum director and asked for updated resumes and resignation letters from some top officials, including the police chief, public works director, finance director, and librarian & stated this request was to find out their intentions and whether they supported her ⁶
As Mayor she temporarily required department heads to get her approval before talking to reporters, saying that they first needed to become acquainted with her administration's policies ⁶
As Mayor she created the position of city administrator
Reduced her own $68,000 salary by 10%, although by mid-1998 this was reversed by the city council [An obvious and clumbsy PR stunt]
According to Wasilla librarian Mary Ellen Emmons, Mayor Palin inquired two or three times in October 1996 as to how Emmons would handle any request to remove books from the library ^{3 ⁶}
Palin fired Emmons and Police Chief Irl Stambaugh in January 1997, stating that she did not feel they fully supported her efforts to govern the city. The next day, following expressions of public support for Emmons and a personal meeting, Palin rescinded the firing of Emmons, stating that her concerns had been alleviated, and adding that Emmons agreed to support Palin's plan to merge the town's library and museum operations.Stambaugh, who along with Emmons had supported Palin's opponent in the election, filed a lawsuit alleging wrongful termination, violation of his contract, and gender discrimination. In the trial, the defense alleged political reasons; Stambaugh said that he had opposed a gun control bill, Alaska HB 270, that Palin supported. The federal judge said in the decision that the police chief serves at the discretion of the mayor, and can be terminated for nearly any reason, even a political one, and dismissed Stambaugh's lawsuit ordering Stambaugh to pay Palin's legal fees.⁶
Using municipal bonds, she made improvements to the roads and sewers, and increased funding to the Police Department.She also oversaw new bike paths and procured funding for storm-water treatment to protect freshwater resources.At the same time, the city reduced spending on the town museum and stopped construction of a new library and city hall.
During her second term as mayor, Palin introduced a ballot measure proposing the construction of a municipal sports center³ to be financed by a 0.5% sales tax increase. The $14.7 million Wasilla Multi-Use Sports Complex³ was built on time and under budget, but the city spent an additional $1.3 million because of an eminent domain lawsuit caused by the failure to obtain clear title to the property before beginning construction.The city's long-term debt grew from about $1 million to $25 million through voter-approved indebtedness of $15 million for the sports complex, $5.5 million for street projects, and $3 million for water improvement projects. A city council member defended the spending increases as being caused by the city's growth during that time.

In 2004, Palin told the Anchorage Daily News that she had decided not to run for the U.S. Senate that year, against the Republican incumbent, Lisa Murkowski, because her teenage son opposed it. Palin said, "How could I be the team mom if I was a U.S. Senator?" [Really? She took career advice from her teenaged child?]
In 2008, as a vice-presidential candidate, Palin characterized her position as having told Congress "thanks, but no thanks, on that bridge to nowhere." This angered some Alaskans in Ketchikan, who said that the claim was false and a betrayal of Palin's previous support for their community. Some critics complained that this statement was misleading, since she had expressed support for the spending project and kept the Federal money after the project was canceled.
In August 2008, Palin signed a bill authorizing the State of Alaska to award TransCanada Pipelines — the sole bidder to meet the state's requirements — a license to build and operate a pipeline to transport natural gas from the North Slope to the Continental United States through Canada.The governor also pledged $500 million in seed money to support the project.It is estimated that the project will cost $26 billion. Newsweek described the project as "the principal achievement of Sarah Palin's term as Alaska's governor."
Palin dismissed Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan on July 11, 2008, citing performance-related issues, such as not being "a team player on budgeting issues." Monegan said that he had resisted persistent pressure from the Governor, her husband, and her staff, including State Attorney General Talis Colberg, to fire Palin’s ex-brother-in-law, state trooper Mike Wooten; Wooten was involved in a child custody battle with Palin’s sister that included an alleged death threat against Palin's father.⁶
She placed an aide on paid leave due to one tape-recorded phone conversation that she deemed improper, in which the aide appeared to be acting on her behalf and complained to a trooper that Wooten had not been fired.⁶
On September 1, Palin asked the legislature to drop its investigation, saying that the state Personnel Board had jurisdiction over ethics issues. The Personnel Board's three members were first appointed by Palin’s predecessor, and Palin reappointed one member in 2008. On September 19, the Governor's husband and several state employees refused to honor subpoenas, the validity of which were disputed by Talis Colberg, Palin's appointee as Alaska's Attorney General. On October 2, a court rejected Colberg's challenge to the subpoenas, and seven of the witnesses, not including Sarah and Todd Palin, eventually testified
On July 4, 2009, Palin's attorney issued a statement threatening bloggers and news organizations with potential defamation lawsuits for spreading rumors about criminal behavior by Palin as if the rumors were fact.⁶
Todd Palin works for the British oil company BP as an oil-field production operator⁷ and owns a commercial fishing business
Palin described herself in an interview as a "Bible-believing Christian." After the Republican National Convention, a spokesperson for the McCain campaign told CNN that Palin "doesn't consider herself Pentecostal" and has "deep religious convictions."³
In a 2006 gubernatorial debate, responding to a question asking the candidates whether they would support teaching creationism in public schools, Palin stated that she supported teaching both creationism and evolution. Shortly after that debate, Palin said in an interview that she meant she supports allowing the discussion of creationism in public schools³, but says it does not have to be part of the curriculum. She supports sex education in public schools that encourages abstinence but also discusses birth control. ³
On global warming, Palin has said that "a changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made."⁷
Regarding foreign policy, Palin supported the Bush Administration's policies in Iraq, but is concerned that "dependence on foreign energy" may be obstructing efforts to "have an exit plan in place"⁷
Palin supports preemptive military action in the face of an imminent threat, and supports U.S. military operations in Pakistan. She declined to give a yes or no answer regarding whether U.S. military forces should make cross-border attacks into Pakistan without the approval of the Pakistani government.

Commentary, linking topics:

¹She failed to complete her 2nd term

²Arguably she was a major cause of the lost election. It is widely held on both sides of the political arena that they should have declined the nomination.

³The agenda of the Fellowship of Christian Atheletes is to promote religion through sports. Her subsequent sports-centered career and religious overtones are arguably an extension of this early-adopted agenda. This clashes however with her declaration in 2006 that she would not allow her religious beliefs to dictate her policies

⁴This is one of the oft-cited 'quitter' moves where it took several attempts for her to complete her degree.

⁵These are incidents where the "quitter" label applies. There is a pattern of "cut and run" behaviour when she finds herself in an underdog scenario, unable to run the show and win admiration.

⁶These are cases where her heavy-handed need to control public perception has overriden her ability to govern properly

⁷Does anyone else perceive Conflicts of Interests in these, or is just me?

Google/YouTube Being Evil

2009-07-06T18:25:00.003-04:00

If I want to watch certain videos that have been 'flagged' on YouTube I am required to sign in to YouTube with an account under the pretense of determining my age.

The offer to link your Google account with your YouTube account is provided in this process - but what if I want to remain anything like anonymous?

If I attempt to create an account with the terms 'Google' or 'YouTube' in the account name, then the name is listed as 'Username Unavailable'. It really doesn't matter what else is in the name. Please go try it yourself to confirm this.

That made it impossible to create a name like "YouTubeLogsWutIWatch" or any derivative that includes their name.

Furthermore, they require my country as a "Location" as well as my postal code, my date of birth, and my gender. The combination of which, if honestly answered - a legally binding requirement - makes me anything but anonymous.

Lastly - the Terms of Use is displayed in a scrolling text field that is 3 lines high, which expands to 10 lines if you click in it, but contains legal conditions that are 311 lines long.

Those conditions are as arbitrary as possible due to the inclusion of this gem in line 4:

"YouTube may, in its sole discretion, modify or revise these Terms of Service and policies at any time, and you agree to be bound by such modifications or revisions."

So even if you do find the terms acceptable today - they can and will change them whenever is suits them to do so and your only recourse is in line 3:

"If you do not agree to any of these terms, the YouTube privacy notice, or the Community Guidelines, please do not use the YouTube Website."

And to be fully up to date and aware of the changes, again back to line 4:

"...you should periodically review the most up-to-date version..."

Mind you - that is just the first 4 lines. Do you want to read the remaining 307 lines? Does anyone besides me ever read them?

So what exactly is so "Evil" about this? Simple - they are acting as an accessory to government agencies that might have an interest in profiling what you watch and doing so in order to protect their own interests vis a vie Liability. No effort is expended in attempting to protect their customers' rights to privacy but rather they pass the buck by stating that they are 'obeying the law'.

Given that laws and governments change and themselves act in "Evil" ways - for example the extreme censorship in communist China and subsequent political imprisonment, organ harvesting, etc.. - Google/YouTube thereby empowers government agencies with the ability to monitor who is watching things that governments might take issue with.

The answer is simple : If you don't maintain records then they cannot be subpoenaed. That would be the lesser of all Evils.

By simply instituting an automatic pop-up that would appear for "flagged" videos for anonymous users, in the way that most adult entertainment sites do for example is an extremely simple technical workaround. This would provide people an option that would maintain their anonymity whilst also directly limiting Google/YouTube's liability.

One Week in El Salvador

2009-07-06T10:27:00.005-04:00

Last week I went to El Salvador for a wedding between two friends of mine from the U.S.A.. The family of the bride comes from there and indeed largely still lives there and so they welcomed all of us with open arms and ecstatic generosity.

El Salvador is a fascinating country with deep mysteries that utterly contrast it's small size. Everywhere I looked I found intrigue and wonder. The first two days I stayed at a ranch maintained by the family on the beach - which was wired with both the local standard outlets and American standard electrical outlets. This was my first hint at the deeply intertwined relationship that El Salvador has with the U.S.A..

I came to understand that not only is a large percentage of their national economy flowing directly from the U.S.A. in the form of money and goods sent back there by immigrants to their families, but in fact their own currency was abandoned in favor of the US Dollar. The scale of this grassroots endeavor can only be begun to be appreciated when you realize that for example - over one million El Salvadorians¹ currently reside in Los Angeles, California alone. LA is jokingly referred to as the 15th Department² of El Salvador for this reason.

Sadly, a large percentage of those people came to the states to escape the military conflicts of the past. Those conflicts are reflected in the architecture of the place to some degree where walled compounds with sturdy gates and armed guards were the norm in the places that I visited³. This was true of both the places where I stayed as well as the restaurants and clubs that we went to.

History and culture are omnipresent in El Salvador. After taking a day-long tour of Mayan ruins I came to realize that almost every small and steep hill that you see anywhere is in fact a pyramid that is buried under about 7 meters of volcanic ash and soil. Only the tiniest amount of these have been studied at all - and those that have been excavated at all end up suffering from extreme erosion due to the lack of care-taking experienced during times of conflict when foreign archaeologists fled the country for a decade or more at a time.

One result of this incredible historical legacy is that construction of any large facilities or even simply houses can and often does grind to a standstill because if you dig just about anywhere you are likely to stumble upon yet another ancient ruin. That makes sustained development rather difficult and worse leads to an unrelenting black market for artifacts fueled by the omnipresent poverty that is slowly erasing an inconceivably enormous unknown history.

Christianity is the only thing more common than poverty in El Salvador. You cannot go anywhere without being surrounded by icons - be they dashboard Saints, placards bearing reaffirming slogans, etchings in car windows, T-Shirts, graffiti, statues, etc. - and you can't really have a conversation without noting subtle reference in the manner in which the idioms and speech patterns reinforce this Faith.

I personally have to wonder if this ecstatic faith helps the poor by providing them Hope or if it keeps them down by reinforcing the Ignorance that keeps them poor to begin with. I did not wonder this out loud. Religious Intolerance is a Real issue in a country of passionate people, a large percentage of whom regularly wield machetes.

It really puts things in perspective when you look at what people complain about in the U.S.A.. I do not know of anywhere in the U.S.A. for example where someone could live for a full year on $3 a day - nevermind your entire life. Yet this is true of the vast majority of the farming community there, who ride in the back of open-air trucks for hours to toil in the fields reaping sugarcane and coffee beans.

While many people in the U.S.A. think disparaging thoughts about El Salvador due to the poverty - there are class-strata ranging from the mind-numbingly poor to the Millionaire level. Maybe that American influence provides the accompanying intolerance and indifference or perhaps it descended from the Spaniards who conquered the place to begin with - likely a combination of both, but those who suffer most are those who are descended from the indigenous people - still referred to by the pejorative term "Pipil" which translates roughly as "people who speak like children".

During my stay I found everyone to be gracious, kind, and generous. Certainly I felt some resentment when visiting the poorest places but it never manifested into anything more than staring, which I expected anyway⁴. In truth, the only people that I had any problem with were other Americans.

Halfway through a group tour of the Mayan ruins two silver-haired gringos started following us around. I didn't think much of it because our tour guide spoke English and had a fascinating take on everything he described - but when they followed us in their own car to the 3rd site - it started getting weird. When they walked ahead of us 60 feet and absconded our tour guide it got annoying. When they started posing in our pictures it got downright creepy. When they followed us into the local shops one by one I realized the truth - they were stealing the services of the armed guard that was accompanying us for their own protection.

No amount of loud hint-dropping afforded a single dollar to go to our tour crew - instead even as we were leaving they again imposed themselves by hitting up our driver for directions for 10 minutes while we were trying to leave - and again failed to compensate our driver, tour guide and guard.

Contrary to the rhetoric of pin-heads like Bill O'Reilly - people like me do not hate America. But I am utterly embarrassed that our chief cultural exports are selfish morons like our tour-parasites, PizzaHut, Burger King, McDondalds, and WalMart. While I am certain that there are people in El Salvador who do hate America, identifying with their mind-sets in this way fails to make me a 'traitor' - but rather defines me as a 'patriot' who would see his own country live up to their high ideals.

Of course, with AT&T's treatment of iPhone users - it was utterly impossible to use any of the 6 local cellular networks to make or receive a phone call. I could only get a WiFi signal in the lobby of my hotel and all of the web sites that I accessed defaulted to Spanish by identifying my locale. This provided the single news item that filtered down to me: the resignation of Sarah Palin. You can be sure that I will have something to say on that topic soon.

¹ The spelling of that word is in great debate so I will defer to my spell-checker
² 'Department' is the local term used that equates to 'County' or 'Parish' in the U.S.A. of which there are 14 in El Salvador
³ Though, to be fair - I wasn't "let off the reservation" during the trip - because I was emphatically told by the locals that it is "Not Safe"
⁴ When you are walking around with the local equivalent of 6 months salary in your pocket it should be expected.

Why PodCasts Suck

2009-06-25T15:18:00.003-04:00

Amateurs, Amateurs, Amateurs...
Let's face it - there is a serious signal-to-noise problem considering how easy it is to make a podcast with any laptop and most cell-phones today. Here are a few clues - if you can't be bothered to write a script and buy a decent microphone - you shouldn't be published on iTunes...
Shiny Happy People
People who are too damned bubbly are just as annoying on a podcast as they are in creepy commercials. Keep your banter to a minimum and don't let it stray to the innane.
I wasted how much time/memory on this?!
The best tagline that I know is for a podcast called Writing Excuses : "15 minutes long because you're in a hurry & we're not that smart!"
Respect your audience's time and they will come back to you. Go light on the fluff and heavy on the substance.
Rerun Central
Some people feel the need to re-run old episodes in a new time slot. This is stupid because the backlog of old episodes is still on the server and annoying to people who find their play-count off & their storage space wasted.
The worst offenders are people with embedded ads - often the podcast is recycled seemingly ONLY to update the ads. That is a fast way to lose subscribers.
Snail-like Production Pace
Not everyone can pump out episodes like a Japanimation Studio - but it you are running a 'beginners course' or somesuch - be sensitive that some people will actually watch from the beginning and might find a 3 month hiatus in filming to be a serious drag.
Off Topic - Off the Road - Off the Subscription List
Pick your topic carefully and stick to it. JavaPosse for example takes a lot of heat for veering off the Java topic and going on about Apple and the iPhone on occasion. I still listen, but their podcasts are notoriously long.
Hubris
A lot of podcasters seem to suffer from the assumption that they are suddenly an Authority on a subject. A little humility would suit you better. Think about it, do you really want to speak down to your audience?

iPhone 3.0 Review Revisions

2009-06-22T16:25:00.003-04:00

I was very wrong about that wi-fi hotspot login feature. It is in fact possibly more annoying than before because it will favor the log-in page for a hot-spot over a cached page from the last one you were at.

The Voice Memo app seems to have better sound quality than some of the existing apps - so I imagine that it is an issue of compression & I assume Apple is using QuickTime...

One odd thing - Whatever "SMS Texts" were called before have been replaced with "Messages" which is odd to me since on the AT&T GoPhone plan they are US$0.20 each. So I really think that giving it an ambiguous name is a bad idea.

Oh and am I the only one that is tired of reading about AT&T whining about the iPhone saturating their under-developed network?

When is Apple going to wise-up and get a business partner that doesn't constantly bash them? Just try walking into an AT&T store and looking for a decent iPhone customer experience. From accessories available to the sales pitch trying to sell you a Blackberry from the onset and then the endless ways they ratchet up the charges with a built-in auto-accept policy if they arbitrarily raise their rates <10% style="font-style: italic;">anyone do business with this company? It is a Faceless Instrument of Disrespect and I loathe being tethered to them as my service provider.

An iPhone 1.0 User's Review of 3.0

2009-06-22T10:05:00.002-04:00

My first reaction to hearing about the features of the 3.0 release were shock and anger - in that it became apparent that the ability to find a stolen iPhone was something that law-enforcement did not actually use nor take seriously!

I know that if someone slapped the label "terrorist" on me they would be able to track me down in minutes by my phone - but if someone commits a felony theft of my expensive portable computing platform - nothing is done. !?

Does that mean that now we have to look up the position for them and tell them where it is - now that this 'find my iPhone' feature is now available? There is so much wrong with this entire train of thought that I need to derail it before I give myself an aneurysm.

My next reaction after downloading it & trying to install & subsequently sync is that it took about an hour of waiting for the backup to complete - and I don't even have the new 'encrypted backup' check-box ticked off.

It picked up a couple of Outlook related calendar conflicts - easy enough to resolve, and interestingly enough waited until after the update to install the new application updates that I had downloaded this morning. Thankfully this makes Twitterrific work again - something that I strangely found myself missing while traveling.

The cut & paste is OK. It took too long to come out & so it seems that they made sure that it is polished. I would have been happier to get it sooner & have it only work with text - the 90% use case scenario - but hey whatever.

The universal search tool is nicer - but only seems to search Apple apps so far. Perhaps there is an API for that so we might see other apps getting search hits too - but I really don't know.

I do like the new Voice memos app - which is so long overdue that it is redundant since I have multiple apps that do the same thing already installed. Landscape mode in email & other places is also one of those things that took too long to polish but is satisfying to finally have.

So far however the most satisfying feature of all is the ability to log into a WiFi network from the Settings Screen - so that it presumably remembers the login info every time I use a hot-spot. This is the single most annoying thing about hotspots in general - so if it works in the way that it seems to I will be very happy.

Follow up on "Fair & Balanced"

2009-06-11T09:56:00.005-04:00

What follows is an excerpt from the transcript of Hardball with Chris Matthews from Friday, July 28th, 2008 wherein Chris interviews Scott McClellan, former White House press secretary for the administration of President George W. Bush: [source]

MATTHEWS: Did you see FOX television as a tool when you were in the White House, as a useful avenue for getting your message out?

MCCLELLAN: Well, I make a distinction between the journalists and between the commentators. Certainly, there were commentators and others, pundits, at FOX News that were helpful to the White House.

(CROSSTALK)

MCCLELLAN: Certainly, we got talking points...

(CROSSTALK)

MCCLELLAN: ... those people.

MATTHEWS: Did people say, call Sean, call Bill, call whoever? Did you do that as a regular thing?

(CROSSTALK)

MCCLELLAN: Certainly. Certainly. It wasn‘t necessarily something I was doing, but it was something that we at the White House, yes, were doing and getting them talking points and making sure they knew where we were coming from.

MATTHEWS: So, you were giving them talking points...

(CROSSTALK)

MCCLELLAN: But I would separate the journalists.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: No, no, this is important.

MCCLELLAN: Yes.

MATTHEWS: You were using these commentators as your spokespeople?

MCCLELLAN: Well, certainly. I mean, certainly. I think that happens to both ways, when people go on other networks, as well, that are—that are favorable towards Democrats and so forth.

MATTHEWS: Well, nobody has ever fed me any crap like that, so I don‘t know what you‘re talking about.

(CROSSTALK)

MCCLELLAN: Well, you‘re an independent-minded guy.

MATTHEWS: I—I—thank you.

But aren‘t you a little embarrassed by the fact that your White House used a television network which is purportedly fair and balanced as your mouthpiece?

MCCLELLAN: Well, I think everybody in this town uses people that are going to be helpful to their cause to try to shape the narrative to their advantage.

MATTHEWS: But a whole network?

MCCLELLAN: Again, I would separate the journalists, because the journalists that I worked with were people, just like the rest of the White House press corps, who would try to report the news.

MATTHEWS: So, you wouldn‘t use Brit Hume as somebody to sell stuff for, but you would use the nighttime guys?

MCCLELLAN: Yes, I would separate that out. And, certainly, and they will say that that‘s because they agree with those views in the White House.

MATTHEWS: Well, they didn‘t need a script, though, did they?

MCCLELLAN: Well, probably not.

'Wedge'y Strategy

2009-06-11T07:57:00.003-04:00

What is going on over at FOX News? Have they just completely dropped the "Fair & Balanced" facade? Balanced on what?

I am going to point to two cases of what I characterize as paranoid, defensive, and Christian-centric commentaries that have been made recently.

The first was the reaction to the newly minted President Obama including 'non-believers' in his inaugural address:

And the second was the reaction to President Obama's speech in Turkey where he defines America as a Nation of Citizens and not a Christian Nation:

I have a few points to make here in addition to those made by the producers of those YouTube videos:

Obama included other Religions in his inaugural address alongside 'non-believers' but the question was never asked if any of them should also be offended
Obama said that we are also not a Muslim Nation - but no one asks if they are offended or 'under siege'? etc.
I distinctly remember a tone coming from them 8 years ago where questioning The President at a Time of War was tantamount to treason. Is the War over? Last I checked, no.

Now let us be clear: I am neither a Democrat nor a Muslim. Above all else I attempt to practice rational thought and analysis whenever possible. The point I am making is not politically motivated.

But the point I am making is that the rhetoric at Fox News clearly is relgiously and politically motivated and any attempt at being "Fair & Balanced" is an effort only to maintain a false pretense.

There is clearly a tone of being 'out to get' Obama which is an obvious shift from the 'we need to support' Bush attitude afforded to the last Executive Regime.

What I find insidious about this is that Obama is not the only target. He is low hanging fruit to anyone whose doctrine reflects the Wedge Strategy in any way. I see a pattern of behavior there that distinctly resonates the character of that ideaology. What am I talking about? Please read.

Socratic Method and Theism

2009-06-10T14:55:00.003-04:00

We live in a world of conflict. Wedge Strategies by manipulative minorities erode a sense of sameness and attempt to draw attention to the differences between us - and while we are busy duking it out - they sneak up on us and try to pull things...

The Religious Conflict that has been stoked for years is very disturbing. There are a lot of religions in the world - but the conflict that I am talking about - really amounts to multiple concurrent conflicts. When you add them together you find multiple groups that are pushing mutually exclusive ideologies: (In alphabetical order)

Christianity
Islam
Judaism
Non-Believers
Scientology

These groups, in some part at the very least, have it in for each other - though that is not a blanket statement nor an over-generalization nor does it apply in all cases. Certainly there are zealots on all sides - a few minutes worth of searching on YouTube yields hours of testimony to this fact.

I am using the 'Non-Believer' label loosely here. I was blown away when Fox News asked the question "Is Obama's use of the term non-believers inclusive or offensive?" Based on the speech and the context of the remark, if that question were on the S.A.T. exam - I would have chosen 'inclusive'. I am pretty sure that were I to have answered such a question with 'offensive' I would have lost a point on that question.

The term 'Atheist' is weird - since it defines a group by what they don't believe - which is never done with any other usage of the post-fix 'ist'. Some people who fall in that category reject the term and others wear it like a badge.

'Agnosticism' does not preclude a belief, but neither does it imply one. Actually I wouldn't put Agnostics in one of the war-camps. If anything they are the biggest losers in the conflict since they are heavily solicited on all sides by those trying to convert people that are considered 'fence-sitters' by one of the aforementioned groups.

I have said before that I do not promote a belief in anything. That is not to say that I do not believe in anything. I am saying that I do not want to believe in anything - I would prefer to think about everything. That gives me the ability to change over time and learn from mistakes.

I do not find the concept of "Faith" to be reassuring. On the contrary, I find the idea of relinquishing my reason to someone else whose judgement I do not trust to be terrifying. It would be difficult for me to mindlessly believe something that was explained to me by someone else who mindlessly believed it. If they had thought about it deeply and could explain to me why they believed something and they used a line of reasoning that I could understand and accept the odds of me accepting it are greater.

True Faith - as it has been explained to me by True Believers - precludes the need to question apparently. If that is so - then the only thing that I have faith in is Asking Questions.

More Fun with Math

2009-06-09T16:47:00.004-04:00

How are we doing as a species? I think a lot of people would argue on both sides of that question.

And I think I find that very telling today.

The reason why is that as of this point in history the glass is at 0.5 capacity. Half full and half empty.

Here's what I mean by this:

I was curious just how many humans the Earth can sustain at one time, so I researched it.

It is not a simple equation. That being said - I took away the over-simplified answer that every average human requires 2.1 hectares of land to support their biological needs for air, food and water. (NOTE: This is not how Americans live - we're more in the 10 hectares each range. That is the overall average human experience from Aspen to Zimbabwe)

So I asked the next logical question: How many hectares of land are there on Earth?

The answer is 14.8 billion hectares.

So - here is the fun with math:

(14.8 * 1 000 000 000) / (6 700 000 000 * 2.1) = 1.05188344

All the land divided by the current world population's requirement for land equals just enough.

So - we are at the median point in history where we have only as much as we need - and nothing more. This clearly shows that if the human population continues to grow - we ALL have serious problems ahead.

Doing the Math

2009-06-09T10:54:00.006-04:00

The World Bank pegs the global GDP in 2004 at US$40.887 trillion [source]

I have included a chart showing how much of the USA's GSP has been devoted to NASA. The peak was the Apollo program which approached 1% of everything produced by the USA.

The pricetag that Scientology puts on becoming an OT8 - i.e. a 'clear' - can be approximately US$380,000 [source]

The population of the world is around 6.7 Billion people. [source]

Scientology's stated intent is to Clear the World.

So my question is : what will that cost?

Based on the above, I came up with:

6 700 000 000 * 380 000 = 2.54600 × 10¹⁵

Or US$254,600,000,000,000,000,000

Or 254 and a half Quintillion greenbacks.

So let's compare that with ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD:

(6 700 000 000 * 380 000) / 40 887 000 000 000 = 62.2691809

Or it will cost more than 62 times all of the wealth in the entire world to Clear the entire world.

Now - I want to go out of my way to point out that I am not bashing Scientology. I am simply pointing out a logical question:

Assuming that I got my math even vaguely correct - there is a huge discrepency here. The largest uncertainty comes from the price-tag. If I am way over the top there (and I have yet to see any evidence of that) - and it is only a third of that price - then do we really need twenty-something planets worth of resources to Get The Job Done?

Or.... or maybe - just maybe - The Church of Scientology needs to start working on getting that price down. A lot.

According to Tom Cruise, they're just here to help. Right? Well so am I. Lower your prices to match your mission. Anything else belies a lack of Conviction in your own Beliefs.

The finest yardstick to measure someone by is how they measure up to their own beliefs, no?

[Full Disclosure - I am not a Scientologist. I do not advocate a belief in anything. My intention is not religious persecution, rather I am simply exercising my freedom of speech to ask questions about what appear to be logical fallacies. My best advice to everyone is: "Question Everything - Real Truth should be able to honestly answer all questions."

If you still find my questions to be offensive after the courtesy that I have afforded you then my advice is to grow thicker skin and think deeply on a regular basis. No 'belief' should be so weak as to be put at risk by someone else asking questions.]

Just Say No to Facebook

2009-06-02T06:49:00.002-04:00

I got a nagging email this morning - from Facebook.

Now I don't know if the person who initially invited me to Facebook actually triggered the reminder email or if it is an automatic 'feature', but this is the text content of the message:

Check out my photos on Facebook

Hi [my email address], I invited you to join Facebook a while back and wanted to remind you that once you join, we'll be able to connect online, share photos, organize groups and events, and more. Thanks, [name of friend who fingered me for them]

Am I over-reacting by saying that I find this to be obnoxious?

If it is not obvious - I do not use Facebook. Nor will I.

I went through the process of giving away personally identifying information that was shared automatically without any ability to hide it (i.e. your age on you home page) when my luddite friends pressured me into joining MySpace. Facebook is notorious for being even more wreckless with how they treat your personal information. I'll Pass.

There is nothing that these services offer that I can not do for free on my own computer in my own house on my own broadband connection - better - and without all of their advertising.

Technically - the same goes for this blog. When they force me to insert ads - I am out of here. If Twitter decides to get personal with me - g'bye! It is just that simple. Using one service while blasting another doesn't make me a hipocrite - it makes me a selective consumer.

Just Say No to Crap - be it products or services. The more that people buy into these scenarios, the more we perpetuate them.

Ozzy Sues Tony Iommi

2009-06-01T09:18:00.004-04:00

So the feud isn't over it would seem.

Ozzy, having a lot more money these days has decided to try to use it to crowbar shared-ownership of the Black Sabbath brand name. While on the surface his requests seem reasonable - his claim about the brand only generating 'worth' after being plugged by Ozzfest is ridiculous.

But don't take my word for it, here are the words direct from Sharon's-ahem-Ozzy's pen:

Statement from OZZY OSBOURNE:

"It is with great regret that I had to resort to legal action against my long term partner, Tony Iommi, but after three years of trying to resolve this issue amicably, I feel I have no other recourse. As of the mid-1990's, after constant and numerous changes in band members, the brand of 'Black Sabbath' was literally in the toilet and Tony Iommi (touring under the name Black Sabbath) was reduced to performing in clubs. Since 1997 when Geezer, Bill and myself rejoined the band, Black Sabbath has returned to its former glory as we headlined sold-out arenas and amphitheatres playing to upwards of 50,000 people at each show around the world. We worked collectively to restore credibility and bring dignity back to the name 'Black Sabbath' which lead to the band being inducted into the UK and US Rock & Roll Hall of Fames in 2005 and 2006, respectively. Throughout the last 12 years, it was my management representatives who oversaw the marketing and quality control of the 'Black Sabbath' brand through OZZFEST, touring, merchandising and album reissues. The name 'Black Sabbath' now has a worldwide prestige and merchandising value that it would not have had by continuing on the road it was on prior to the 1997 reunion tour. Tony, I am so sorry it's had to get to this point by me having to take this action against you. I don't have the right to speak for Geezer and Bill, but I feel that morally and ethically the trademark should be owned by the four of us equally. I hope that by me taking this first step that it will ultimately end up that way. We've all worked too hard and long in our careers to allow you to sell merchandise that features all our faces, old Black Sabbath album covers and band logos, and then you tell us that you own the copyright. We're all in our 60's now. The Black Sabbath legacy should live on long after we have all gone. Please do the right thing."

Green is the new Black...

2009-05-29T09:38:00.008-04:00

...so break out your jackboots.

This is was actually taken from an ad sent to me in an email today:

"Green's the new black…

But not everyone can walk the walk. Don't be that guy. "

I seem to remember one of the defining characteristics of the 80's being the mantra of "Just Say No" and the underlying message that peer-pressure was wrong and something to be resisted.

Nowadays however it seems to me that social pressure has been re-purposed. A decade of Fear is giving way to an atmosphere of being pushy. I find myself on the receiving end of an awful lot of 'priceless advice' these days. Raised eyebrows are usually the response I get when I bother to ask a question.

For example, I regularly get a nasty-gram from an office manager because I will not opt-in for electronic check-stubs and I still have them printed and delivered to me. She is the one who does that delivery. The bi-weekly email includes the imperative "Go Green!".

I asked her which she thought was worse - burning coal to generate electrons to power all the computers in the network every time I access that information for the rest of eternity - or the industrial pollution involved in putting a piece of paper in a file-folder in my file-cabinet.

In reponse to that I get a dirty-look. I have erred twice apparently in that I both asked her to Think about something she didn't care about and exposed the fact that it is only about the convenience of her not having to deliver those stubs to everyone every other week.

Let us be clear - I am not condoning being wasteful of resources. In a society where we have made disposible objects out of materials that last thousands of years and we have done so for decades - radical shifts in policy need to happen.

My problem is that the sorts of changes that are being sold to people are an illusion of control. When you really think things through - like flourescent lights replacing incandescent lights - we find that there are entirely new issues that no one thought through - like the mercury in those lamps that now will end up in all of the landfills.

It seems however that anything that is truly revolutionary is still considered to be "hippy bullshit" even when it is proven to work. Until you can buy it at WalMart, it seems that a large segment of the American public has a huge Blind Spot.

Reason vs. Zealotry

2009-05-26T07:58:00.006-04:00

"All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others." - Douglas Adams

I went to Las Vegas this weekend. The overwhelming wave of mass-stupidity was awe inspiring and not a little nauseating.

Honestly I finally felt like I was backed into a corner. After 8 years of Neocons waging their Culture War I finally snapped. Maybe it was just my elation after discovering the YouTube phenomenon that is Thunderf00t that started the first pebbles rolling - but the unrelenting intellectual maggotry that I endured in the last 96 hours turned them into an avalanche.

I will now share 2 video clips that in my opinion sum up my ideological position to a great degree:

The first is a clip of Barack Obama in 2006. Keep in mind that I disagree a great deal with President Obama's positions on many issues. Furthermore we do not adhere to the same belief system. That is not the point. This is a question of comportment and demeanor.

The second clip is the last in a 10 part series - but I think it stands very well on it's own. It rationally disputes the concepts of Creationism and Intelligent Design in a simple, logical and complete way.

I Laughed Out Loud ...

2009-05-19T15:07:00.005-04:00

I was mining YouTube for entertainment the other night...

This, incidentally, is a phenomenon that is getting all too popular at parties - people share their demented finds and watch as their friends recoil in horror or laugh until they split their sides.

At least 3 times in recent memory I have been to parties where this has happened. Maybe I just need more interesting friends.

But it is interesting that those same people would never think to email me a link, nor even Tweet it. It is the witnessing of your reaction that is the valued moment it would seem.

But all of that aside - I was determined to watch the new Red Dwarf Episodes. And so I did. It was quite the emotional roller-coaster and in the end I loved it.

But then I started poking around and I came across something I find interesting. It is an entire series of short video clips called "Why Do People Laugh at Creationists?" There's 29 parts to the thing! And yet I found myself sitting through each and every one of them and marveling at the eloquent ruthlessness of it.

Now please do not think that I hold an anti-religious viewpoint. I do not. I actually am of the opinion that Religion and Science are nothing at all like mutually exclusive and it constantly amazes me when people get hung up trying to reconcile the two.

I am however a scientist. Perhaps 'engineer' is a better term, since it is the applied sciences, however I prefer the term 'technologist' since what I actually do for a living is to apply technology to solve problems. I would have absolutely nothing to work with if I did not have the fruits of science.

Furthermore I apply the Scientific Method in every aspect of my life, every day. That is to say that I try very hard to learn from my mistakes.

Experiment, Observe, Verify/Negate Theory, Hypothesize, Repeat.

Most life forms follow this simple procedure to eke out knowledge of the world that they live in. This does not preclude them from Loving others, displaying Compassion, and seeking Justice. The two complement each other, rather than negating each other.

What perhaps makes some people uncomfortable is when they unduly influence each other. Using technology to seek Justice for example is a cloudy mixture. At what point does the Power afforded by Scientific research threaten to overwhelm the concepts of Compassion? All too soon, if we are to learn from History.

But on the other hand - people get downright nasty when they appear to conflict. If the Big Bang Theory did not line up with Genesis in a vague sort of way I am certain that it would be pursued with equal venom to that aimed at the work of Charles Darwin.

The interesting point there is that Evolution explains the Diversity of Life, not it's origin. This is usually the sticking point that starts the argument to begin with - a lack of proper understanding.

It is this lack of understanding that causes the conflicts to begin with. The only people who seem to be on the attack against the accepted scientific explanations for our reality are those that not only do not make an effort to learn the science that they are trying to debate, but also display a lack of understanding in how their own acknowledged religion would have them behave in a confrontation.

WWJD? Would he act like the stereotypical nut-job Zealot:

Watch Bill O'Reilly and hang on every word - calling people you disagree with 'pinheads'?
Tell scientists they don't have the Right to Question 'Biblical Truths'?
Use votebots to get anti-creationist videos banned from YouTube?
Slander anyone who disagrees with you?
Encourage intolerance?
Participate in a Culture War?
Blow up statues of Buddha with explosives?
Bomb abortion clinics?
Start a New Era of Crusades?

Or perhaps would he instead pursue the loftier 'egg-headed' goals like:

Encourage people to seek the Truth
Encourage people to speak the Truth
Cure suffering, disease and pandemics
Give clean water to those who have none
Feed the starving - Finding new ways to grow food
Extend everyone's lifespan
Be Compassionate and defend the Rights of others to express their opinions, especially when you do not agree with them - but then holding everyone's opinions up to the same scrutiny

Go Pink!

2009-05-15T14:06:00.004-04:00

I have had it with all of the ridiculous colors that have been claimed by people with political agendas.

First we had the red ribbon. Then everyone had to have a stupid ribbon color for their own pet cause.

Then thanks to the news network election night graphics we now have colors for political parties. i.e. "Red States" and "Blue States"

Then somewhere along the line we switched from ribbons on the lapel to ribbon magnets on your car and started wearing colored awareness bracelets.

I am acutely 'aware' that this nonsense is annoying the hell out of me.

The latest color to demand attention is "Green". I am commanded over & over to "GO GREEN" - usually requiring me to do something that I have always done in some new way, usually more inconvenient and almost always clever but not very well thought out.

I tried to look up Green on Wikipedia, to try to get my head around the philosophy. But it seems that it is in fact a political agenda with a party to go along with it. Why can't the Libertarians get the bandwagon rolling the way the greeniacs have?

I saw a commercial where a little girl was "teaching her father to be a better man" by making him buy a florescent replacement bulb instead of an incandescent one. Does a "better man" really toss that much mercury into the landfill just so he can light his walkway?

Here is an agenda that you can wrap your head around in a crappy economy:

Go Pink!

EVERYONE is doing it. It works like this - first you complain about how AWFUL the economy is. You complain so much and so endlessly that you convince everyone that you are DOOMED. Then you have every justification in the world to start treating them like crap - because it isn't you - it's the economy that is doing it!

Why Pink? Mr. Pink epitomizes this philosophy! Remember - "I don't tip!"

Don't argue with people about it - "be a professional."

Think about it - he is the ONLY survivor when everything goes bad.

This amounts to ruthless selfishness, which is what the "Me" generation has always been all about. In business this amounts to the aloof procurement of profits and moral ambiguity.

Star Trek?

2009-05-14T08:20:00.005-04:00

People keep asking me if I have seen the new Star Trek movie.

The answer is No.

I really, honestly, and truly am over it. It is like 'kicking' World of Warcraft. Once you are out - you are all the way out.

I do not see why we need a new Captain Kirk. The old one was fine - and he's dead. Leave him alone.

I truly love the original series. It is insanely great because it is so awful. They accomplished so much with nothing at all but good writing. The acting was bad, the sets were bad, the props were bad and the costumes were a joke - but it inspired generations. Period.

I thought the idea of the Next Generation was a lot better than what the reality of it turned out to be. The problem is that is was successful and that gave them a shooting license to make more. Everything since then has been an exponential curve of crap, with each release getting worse and worse.

I never made it through all of the Deep Sleep 9 episodes. So maybe that is where they lost me. The whole idea of the aliens mapping to racial stereotypes** was taken to a whole new level.

Voyager was a train wreck. They never took on any character of their own and they ended up neutering the Borg in their final episode so - oops they wrote the entire franchise into a corner.

'Enterprise' - I think I might have seen 4 or 5 episodes all the way through. It was just utterly unwatchable and completely formulaic. And why would you try to make a show set earlier in time where everything looks far more futuristic?

The movies are a whole other thing. Sure they figure into the growth of the franchise as well as it's death. But Hollywood has it's own logic and stories that you can get away with on television don't fly on film. As such - the fact that scripts were subjected to the rules of reductionism and the abrasion of focus groups more and more over time is quite obvious.

That the first one got made at all was amazing. It was awful and it was a glimpse into the future of just how bland and banal the Trek franchise might turn out. But it also made money.

So when reality kicked in and they made Wrath of Khan - it was the game changer. Big Money, Big Success, Big Bummer at the end.... that turned into a cliffhanger? Whaaaa? The Search for Spock was the Search for More Money. They were firmly set on that course of the exponential crap curve.

Everything has been an effort to cash-in since then. First Contact was almost good in spite of itself, but it too was guilty of retcon-ing the Borg, the inventor of the Warp Drive, and the worst Star Trek sin since abusing tachyons...

Why does every Star Trek story need some kind of stupid time travel plot?

1. It's a Warp Drive - if you go faster than light - you create paradoxes naturally, right?
Except of course that they never once seemed to mention this.

2. Because technology has gotten better in real life - and it makes the 'future' look ridiculous.

3. Because when you write about the future for 30 years, you end up writing yourself into a corner an awful lot

4. Because staff writers are lazy and can't be bothered even reading the material that their franchise license is based on

5. Because having to watch every Star Trek thing ever made back to back is a full time job that takes a few months - and having bothered to do so is not a job requirement for a staff writer.

6. Because sets are expensive and it is always good for a cheap laugh to have people from the future set in "today" and watch the canned hilarity ensue...

**- Klingon=Russia, Vulcan=Japan, Romulus=China, Bajor=Israel, Cardassia=Germany, bla bla bla, don't remember, don't care...

Rotational Medicine

2009-05-13T10:08:00.002-04:00

I do not have a primary topic today. I am not linking to an article or cutting & pasting some quote. That formulaic method for writing blog posts is really what led to things like Twitter. Tell the point of your story & not the story. Tell your punchline & not the joke... enough already!

I just want to talk about how we are all led around the nose by people with hidden agendas.

I have talked recently about how the victimization of children is being used to push an agenda that dramatically erodes your privacy.

I think it is likely that parents are targeted for hot-button issues as a swing-vote because they are busy and therefore can not afford to devote enough time to rational analytical thought to parse through the spin-doctoring and see the Bill of Goods they are being sold. Politicos shrink-wrap divisive issues in a way that can be spoon-fed to stressed-out/over-worked/over-protective parents to elicit the appropriate knee-jerk response.

It is a tactic. If you find yourself in this demographic - Be Very Careful.

Let's shift gears and put out a simple statement:

Cars kill more people than cigarettes.

Do we want to talk about carbon monoxide emissions? You know - that stuff we labeled 'second-hand smoke' and pointed fingers at each other about. I am willing to bet that death-toll would put us over the top alone.

But we don't see that as the reason to stop idling your car. No - that is because of greenhouse gas emissions. The hell with you and your cancer. Quit smoking, roll your window up, and don't idle your car.

That's another thing - we are constantly being told what to do for our own good - but in the form of a cop-out. The onus of safety is pushed back on Joe Public as though it's his fault. Take the example of the bank website that originally mandated that you log in with your social security number then later sending you a nasty-gram telling you that you have to make a new account because SS#'s are not a secure data point. It was Their mistake to begin with - but the onus is put on the customer to clean up after it for them. Mind you - if you complained about the boneheaded policy to begin with then you were afforded all of the attention and expertise of your closest brick wall.

Has the constant double-speak of the Bush administration completely numbed us to the ability to tell reality from bullshit? Why does everyone act like the Chinese government these days? It seems like everyone is just trying to make themselves look good, rather than devoting any effort at all in an attempt to be good.

Gartner vs. Web 2.0

2009-05-12T09:02:00.004-04:00

I would love to know what the kickback system is at Gartner and if some eCommerce software vendor paid for this bit of scare-mongering...

We all know that most execs in the Fortune 500 need to justify any decision that costs >$50 with a Gartner report.

Well Gartner just gave Web 2.0 Developers the proverbial Finger.

If you were planning on getting any eCommerce customers to convert to a Web 2.0 experience - you had better make efforts to suppress or discredit this report.

The gist is that companies would see a better return on their investment by spending development dollars on making your web site more easily searchable. That supposedly will lead to more sales.

So - if I am reading this correctly - the same short-term thinking that got us into this deeply dysfunctional economy is now somehow going to get us out of it?

It would seem that Gartner believes that there is no such thing as a competitive advantage to be gained from long-term investments in innovation. So if you're the bandwagon-jumping type - put down the Twitter API's and start digging into the "how to make your web site search-friendly for Google" guide. You're not going to be writing JavaScript this Summer after all - you're going to be scraping the cruft off of URL's.

MySpace is part of "The System"

2009-05-11T16:46:00.005-04:00

This is a short rant about privacy.

I am not going to defend sex offenders.

What I AM going to say is this:

There is a federal database of identification. It is populated with anyone who has ever been booked or had to apply for a license of some sort. (Drivers, holders of Gun permits, pyrotechnicians, Notary Publics, etc..)

Fans of CSI will know this as "The System".

The federal government is actively leveraging all centralized social networking sites to augment the contents of "The System." That means that every time you post your friend's picture on Facebook you are registering them with law enforcement.

If you do not believe me, have a look at what happened with MySpace in February.

Again - I am NOT defending Sex offenders. But you need to consider this carefully. This is an edge case. It should not be used as a foot-in-the-door or grease for the slippery slope.

I noticed a similar exception case that was used by border patrol agents claiming the legal right to view the contents of someone's hard drive when entering the country - based on child pornography charges.

My point is this - once the Authorities have any reason to violate your privacy - they will inevitably behave as though they have the Right to do so as a blanket policy.

But then again - what reasonable right to privacy can you claim - if you maintain a MySpace or FaceBook account?

Hyping the Cloud Fantastic

2009-05-08T13:42:00.005-04:00

If Buzz-words are the coin of the realm in the IT industry then licenses to print money with clouds on it are being handed out to tech writers with their morning crumpets.

I would like to juxtapose two different links:

Cloud computing is for the birds - an article about how SaaS is too expensive for small businesses to use. Essentially a Cloud-debunker.

The Stages of Change - an article written about the history of teaching the New Math in schools

Really - just the bullet points on the first page make the point.

It all really just comes down to where we are on the Hype-Cycle graph now doesn't it?

M$ Talks to a New Generation

2009-05-08T08:59:00.003-04:00

I take a lot of pot shots at Steve Ballmer. He is an easy target and there is plenty of material out there to draw from. He recently spoke at Stanford to the Entrepreneur forum. This is perhaps the most eloquently that I have ever heard him speak, so I thought that I would draw attention to it in the spirit of fairness.

I will let you draw your own opinion.

Regardless of how well he comes across - the substance is really what counts. There is enough to take exception to within.

Never Agree to Hold Someone's Jacket...

2009-05-06T11:47:00.003-04:00

The Pirate Bay has fallen. It was a spectacular trial with all kinds of interesting arguments thrown back and forth, including Perry Mason-style antics with surprise witnesses and lawyers getting chewed out by the judge for pulling them.

But in the end - the truly miserable part is WHY they all got a year in prison and a fine that maybe three people I have ever met could ever possibly pay :

"responsibility for assistance can strike someone who has only insignificantly assisted in the principal crime"

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall cited in his closing arguments a Supreme Court of Sweden opinion that a person holding the jacket of someone committing battery can be held responsible for the battery. - Wikipedia

This is a very tenuous claim to justify a Scorch the Earth policy of law enforcement. Everyone was found guilty of being an accessory to the 'crime' of copyright infringement. Mind you - there are no charges against anyone for those actual crimes. So it's a lot like buying a case with no iPhone to put in it just so that all of your friends who have them think that you have one too.

Why did I put the word 'crime' in quotes? Because copyright infringement IMHO is something that is more applicable to be dealt with in civil court. Having corporate sponsored raids on internet sharing facilities sounds a LOT like selective enforcement to me.

If I wrote a song and some local band was playing it in a bar - can I call in the cops to raid the place? How about if you plagiarize something that I have written?

What if a record company stole a song that I wrote, had someone else record it & released the album - do I get to call a raid on their CD-duplication factory?

And there it is - ONLY corporations get any kind of justice department backing for their copyright infringements. That is highly suspect and puts the public in a position where the ONLY power that they can claim is by doing something illegal.

It comes down to this - the record companies & movie studios only wanted to sell us their products on round pieces of plastic. So we - the technical people - figured out how to put that on a wire when they refused to consider it. Now that we can do it for free - they want to charge for it. The ONLY value that they can add is that "you're not going to be arrested/sued/fined".

As for stealing from the artists? The distribution companies robbed them blind to get their content to begin with. You can't steal from someone who has been mugged already.

In The News...

2009-05-05T14:40:00.003-04:00

Here are just a few weird things of note that I want to rant about but just don't have the time:

Regarding Enterprise Architecture : Is EA About The Business Or Just IT?
Regarding the "flat world" being tilted towards India : Infosys chief urges action on ageing
This tagline is insane "Are you stuck at home afraid to go out because of the swine flu epidemic? Here is something to do while you are there - watch an online seminar...."
Regarding Asia weathering the US Recession : Asian shares hit seven-month highs
and this: China's manufacturing sector returns to growth, data show
Regarding Gartner visibly pushing the concept outsourcing : Gartner Announces Outsourcing & Vendor Management Summit 2009
And lastly on the US Media being woefully deluded into believing that they have any real comprehension of the history of Taiwan : Taiwan and China Mover Closer to Normal

Trent Reznor vs. Apple

2009-05-03T22:33:00.002-04:00

I enjoy music by the band Nine Inch Nails. I downloaded their iPhone app because I have tickets to an upcoming show & using that app is an interesting way to connect with the rest of the tour.

It seems that Apple rejected a recent update to the NIN iPhone application.

I like what Trent has to say about it & his rationale I believe is well thought out. NIN is one of the few bands that does not self-censor in an effort to placate the likes of Wal-Mart. I think that is to be respected. Apple should not be the self-appointed guardian of Moral Culture any more than Bill O'Reilly should be.

I find it interesting that international law forbids the practice of targetting culture. That covers religion, art and charity. For example, the Taliban destruction of ancient Buddhist statues.

So - in my mind - anyone who sets out as a "Culture Warrior" is intentionally thumbing their nose at international law and the tenets of peace. I think that even qualifies as "crimminal".

When Pigs .. something-or-other..

2009-04-30T18:12:00.002-04:00

Gartner Says Swine Flu Is a Reason to Act, Not Panic

OK Have you got that? Gartner says so. Is it just me or does everyone seem to need Gartner to agree with just about anything they want to do?

When did professional advice turn into a mother-may-I scenario? What about when they are wrong?

I wonder what people would do if they had said to panic...

Whaaat!?

2009-04-20T09:00:00.002-04:00

Remember what I was saying about Serious Rumors? Well that one actually fell apart. Now we have a new one:
Oracle to pick up Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion after rival suitor IBM dropped bid

File this under "the lengths that Oracle will go through to kill MySQL"

For anyone who doesn't understand what I mean by that - allow me to break it down:

Databases are what are used to store information on 90%+ of web sites.

Oracle's founders invented the database for IBM and later spun off their own company. The database concept is the center of their universe. They make a lot of money on them and they charge a lot of money for them.

MOST web sites use MySQL as their database - which is for the most part - free.

So Oracle intrinsically hates MySQL as much as Microsoft intrinsically hates Linux.

Get the picture?

I have not even begun to talk about the implications for the Java platform and programming language, nor for Oracle EBS for that matter...

I am going to continue to use NetBeans in favor of JDeveloper for now, but eyes to the horizon for stormy weather ahead. I am just thankful that Java was Open-Sourced in time. Oracle certainly never would have done that. They have not done so with PL/SQL for example...

gregory42

OTOH BF1943 R0xx0rs

Liam Neeson is a Loser

I *still* h8 BF3

I h8 BF3, SRSLY

Home Recording vs. the World

Halloweenie

On the Surface

Real Glimpses of What is Going On

BP and Spin Control

Disaster in Progress

The Steve vs. The Flash

Last Chance to See

Bring Down IE6

Learning Jython

Fun With Phones

Where U @?

Surveillance Shocker: Sprint Received 8 MILLION Law Enforcement Requests for GPS Location Data in the Past Year:

If you ever wanted to know who "THEY" are...

With Great Freedom Comes Great Liability

These are Not the Droids you are Looking For...

Facebook Privacy, Security Fears Grow with Social Network Risks

And So It Begins...

It is Official - Behold the iPad

Government-made Terror-Mule

Welcome to the out-of-control decade

Chinese Government Hacks Google

Too Many Tweets...

World of Warcraft & Your Privacy

Facebook and Your Privacy

Enough is Too Much By Half

One Month I Want Back

Go.... fish?

Robot Arms Race

Your Privacy Evaporating : One Day At A Time

Facebook/Mugbook

Modern Propaganda - Your Tax Dollars At Work

"Creation" doesn't fly in the USA

Big Brother Pretty Useless

1,000 CCTV cameras to solve just one crime, Met Police admits

Virtual Wires

5 Y's & 2 ToDo's

The 'Right Way' to Start a Company...

The Stuff of Snowboarder Nightmares

GT-10B in Depth

Nothing Wastes Time Like "Crunch Time"

Metal Gear Music

A Work of Fiction

They call it H1N1 now...

Memetics

Scala is pretty Groovy after all

Shocking and Awful

Line6 Follow-Up

'Reasonable' Rock & Roll

iTunes Uses "Pentium Math"

Dropping the Ballmer

My Next Phone?

What You Weren't Allowed To Know...

Dude, Where's My Party?

A Plea to All iPhone Developers

Freedom of Speech is not Freedom from Spam

A Blogspot Feature

Wordle Snapshot

Video Games vs. Violent Crime

Hubba Hubba Huh?

How to Share Photos without Facebook

Sarah Palin – The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Google/YouTube Being Evil

One Week in El Salvador

Why PodCasts Suck

iPhone 3.0 Review Revisions

An iPhone 1.0 User's Review of 3.0

Follow up on "Fair & Balanced"

'Wedge'y Strategy

Socratic Method and Theism

More Fun with Math

Doing the Math

Just Say No to Facebook

Check out my photos on Facebook

Ozzy Sues Tony Iommi

I still h8 BF3