I'm getting game-crazy

The Wii has lived up to my expectations in a big way.  However, I’ve run into one big problem: quality games are few and far between.  So, two weeks ago, I broke down and picked up an Xbox 360.  I’d heard that the Xbox arcade (part of the Xbox marketplace) was a great place to get/play simple games.  This was just what I’ve been missing with the Wii; its online store only has old Nintendo games, nothing aimed at the Wii specifically.

Right away, my Xbox experience was great. I have it hooked up and doing 1080i video; the difference from the Wii’s 480p is very noticeable.  And, the games are definitly high quality, even thought the controller is 10 year old technology (except, of course, for the fact that its wireless).

The media aspects of the Xbox marketplace are also great. Now, this is serious video on demand.  Between the trial games and the quick video downloads, the Xbox has definitely filled out my entertainment center.

So far, the only problem I’ve had with the Xbox is that it won’t play Divx encoded video.  I have it set up as an externder to my Media Center (which is great; the Xbox has much better video than the MC does), however, it won’t play downloaded videos that are Divx encoded.  I’ve found several applications on the web that provide streaming video decoding for the XBox, and I may move to that eventually, but nothing seamless.  Hopefully, MS wakes up and deals with this soon.

Finally, the Wii is not orphaned.  I’m currently playing Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii, and its great. It makes great use of the Wiimote/nunchuck combo, and the graphics are much more “on par” with the Xbox (though still just 480p).

So much fun, so little time …

9/3/2007 12:55:50 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general

Wii Adendum
An addendum to my previous Looking For Wii entry:  I found one.  I was in Best Buy at just the right time, and was able to snag one.  I like it.  It a lot of fun playing WiiSports.  However, traditional games don’t take advantage of the Wii’s unique interface. I’m hoping that more Wii-specific games come out soon. I can only play so much baseball and tennis …
6/29/2007 12:34:10 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Another try
Trying to post from BlogJet again…. Let’s see if this works now too..
5/10/2007 9:32:34 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

It seems that I filled up my blog...

I finally got back to blogging yesterday, and what did I discover? 

My blog site no longer worked!!!!  After spending yesterday and now today trying to figure out why my site would spontaneously stop working, I discovered some strangeness in my log files.

I”m still not exactly sure what happened, but at least, blogging works again!

2/19/2007 8:36:07 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Yet another test
Yet another test.  Explanation to follow…
2/19/2007 8:34:07 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

What's with all of this TV stuff?
Yes, I know I’ve been posting a lot of TV related stuff and not a lot of “more serious” stuff.  It’s a bit ironic:  I’m so busy at work, that I don’t have time to do the serious posts.  TV’s coming easily right now.
10/27/2006 8:35:37 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Runway Serendipity

This past weekend, I found myself sitting at a table of my cousins (it was my sister’s and brother-in-law’s 25th wedding anniversary).  It turns out that we’re all Runway fans.  What are the odds?

9/27/2006 8:56:55 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

Representing Reality

John Dvorak has an article on “Photography and the Truth” today.  This got me thinking.  Before there was photography, no one considered pictures as accurate representations of reality.  Even a painting of a person was accepted as an artist’s interpretation of that person.

Thanks to living in a world of photographs, we presume that pictures somehow represent “reality” now.  Here’s the clincher: we also assume that pictures done before photography also represent reality.  This leads people to think that our ancestors must have been incredibly delusional to think some of what they painted was real.  Frankly, I think those ancestors would be amazed at how easily we accept photographs as “real” today, and using a program like Photoshop to “change” a picture would probably seem perfectly reasonable to them.

9/19/2006 4:06:43 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general

The fog starts to clear: Amazon Unboxed and the "Fast Forward" problem.

I was using my Media Center (where I ran into the Unboxed issue I talked about earlier) and discovered a couple of things:  Amazon does, indeed, use Microsoft technology for their videos:  The Mythbusters video I bought automatically appeared in my Media Center Videos list; the file is actually a WMV file.  The Fast Forward / Seek problem that I had with it also happens with Media Center.

After a quick Google search, it turns out that FF/Seek only works on indexed files. So:
1. This is not an “Amazon Player” problem per se, since all WMV’s exhibit the same behavior
2. The video player in Media Center is different than Windows Media Player: When I ran a video with WMP outside of the Media Center software, it acted like it had never been run before.
3. The Media Center video player can’t FF/Seek indexed videos (that seek fine in Real Player or Divx Player).

My conclusions:
1. Amazon is sitll not off the hook, because:  There were a lot of problems other than the lack of seek support; if they’d just indexed the file, Seek would have been supported with other players.
2. The Media Center video player also needs work.  FF/Seek works fine for recorded TV shows; it should work for pre-recorded shows as well (at least those with the necessary indexing).

Amazon, Microsoft, get with the program! I just might have to try out the new ReplayTV software after all…

9/17/2006 10:17:39 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | technology

Books, Books, Books.

Today, I saw a post from Jennifer that led to her list of favorite (and not so favorite) books.  This sort of boggled my mind, since I wanted to post about two books that I have: one I just finished reading, and one I’m reading now:

Practices of an Agile Developer (Venkat Subramaniam & Andy Hunt, ISBN 097451408X):
I just finished reading this; its probably the best book on agile development that I’ve ever read.  The book is very practical, and not geared to a particular flavor of agile development, like the XP books are.  I’d put this on my “must read” list for any developer.

Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# (Robert C. Martin & Micah Martin, ISBN 0131857258):
This is an interesting book, because its a re-do of a book that “Uncle Bob” wrote a while back focused on Java.  This book makes his points (all language agnostic) more accessible to C# programmers.  There’s an excellent chapter on an example of agile development around scoring bowling.  I saw Bob do this live, and it was remarkable.

I’m thinking of putting up a list like Jennifer’s, but at this point, that seems a daunting task:  I read a lot of books!

9/13/2006 8:53:35 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | books

My Faith in Science has been Restored

And, keep in mind what I just said: Faith in Science.

I’m now reading James P. Hogan’s Kicking the Sacred Cow. It’s an interesting book, a rebuttal of various “popular science” themes, including Evolution, the Big Bang, and (my favorite) Global Warming.  Hogan applies a clear-eyed scientific method to these issues, reporting what experts in the field are saying, instead of what “experts” in other fields are saying.  Apparently, this is an ongoing problematic theme in popular science today: Scientists commenting outside their fields of expertise are just as likely as lay persons (in fact they are lay persons) to go along with public opinion as lay people are.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the subjects based upon what I read:

• Evolution: (surprisingly) There is no scientific evidence that Natural Selection (as currently defined) works. None. Note: this one really rattled me. I knew there were “issues” with current evolutionary thought, but wow!
• Astronomy: Most red shifts are not caused by motion (Doppler shift).  The distance of objects in the universe (and therefore the apparent size / age of the universe) cannot be measured by red shift.
• Global Warming: CO2 emissions actually follow changes in temperature rather than precede them (as would be expected if CO2 emissions were causing warming).  Global warming is (apparently) more correlated with sunspots than increases in greenhouse gases.

Fair warning, this book takes you to the scientific roots of these issues, so its a very dry read. Lots of statistics and such.  And (as the title implies), it completely flies in the face of popular thought regarding these issues.

I highly recommend reading this book! I wonder what Al Gore thinks of it…

7/31/2006 11:18:10 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general

Pink Panther

I watched Steve Martin’s Pink Panther over the weekend, and I was surprised at how good it was. It was downright hilarious at spots.  When I first heard about the movie, I wasn’t impressed.  After all, how could Steve Martin doing a fake French accent be funny? Especially as funny as Peter Sellers was.  When watching the movie (I was desperate), I remembered the following:

• Peter Sellers was using a fake French accent too.
• There were only to honestly good “Inspector Clouseau” movies: “The Pink Panther” and “A Shot in the Dark” (the best of the series). The other movies were made much later (The Pink Panther was in 1963, The Return of the Pink Panther was in 1975, 12 years later), and were just done to “cash in” on the Pink Panther popularity.

Steve Martin’s take on the character was at least as good as Peter Sellers’ take, and I think the movie was just about as good as the original Pink Panther. Still not as good as A Shot in the Dark, but that was a classic.

Now, I’m disappointed that the movie didn’t do better at the box office, because I’d like to see more from this acting team, especially Steve Martin, Jean Reno, and Emily Mortimer (Nicole).

Come on, Steve! Give us a another one!

7/31/2006 10:07:46 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

CodeCamp 2.0 was suprisingly good

Frankly, I didn’t have very high hopes.  They cut the camp from 2 to 1 day, the organization showed extreme last-minute-itis, and it was way out in the boonies of north Vancouver (WA, not Canada).

In actuality, it turned out to be at least as good as last year, maybe even better. I especially liked the sessions on Iron Ruby and WMI. Boy, could I have used that WMI knowledge last year!

Now, I’m looking forward to next year’s camp, even if it is back at the WSU campus in Vancouver (a very nice, if remote, campus).

I want to give special kudos to Stuart Celarier and Jason Mauer for putting on such a good show.

That’s not to say that there weren’t some “opportunities for improvement”:

• The agenda came out way late. That needs to be better.
• I never was able to get wi-fi to work there. I know other people were, but they need to be better about helping out there. A few people were helpful, especially Stuart, but other folks just threw their hands up.
• They ran out of sugar for the coffee, and had no creamer at the start. They eventually fixed the creamer issue, but for those of us that can taste the difference, Sweet-n-Low tastes vile.  Yes, I know that this is “extra” stuff, but you don’t want to mess with a techie’s coffee!

But, these were ultimately small issues, and (as I said), it was a good code camp overall.

7/24/2006 5:36:29 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

I'm going Runway crazy, it seems

I don’t know if this is because of my own fascination with the show, or their great perception of the value of blogging, but I just noticed that I’m subscribed to 4 blogs related to Project Runway. I have Tim Gunn’s blog (he’s one of the two “hosts” of the show), Andy Cohen’s blog (Bravo’s VP of Production), Tim Gunn’s podcast (interestingly, not the same as his blog, though they both are covering episodes of the show), and now Rucker’s blog (written by the producer of Project Runway).

Could I possibly get more Runway related material? Maybe

In all honesty, I consider Project Runway the closest thing on TV to what I do every day (actually, my tasks are more like Tim Gunn’s, who I enjoy the most on the show).  I’ve written about this before: it amazes me how much in common software development has with fashion design.  If you’re sceptical about this claim, and haven’t seen the show, watch it! I think you’ll see what I mean.

7/21/2006 9:21:22 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general

AM Cinema! Yay!

John Campea on the Movie Blog is reporting that AMC is going to try showing movies on Friday-Sunday pre-noon for $4–$6.

I’m all for this as a trend (hear that, Regal?). I prefer going to movies in the morning. I’m an early riser, and I think of noon the way most people think of 3:00. In fact, I’d even pay full price to see a movie at 10:00 AM: Get up, have breakfast, go to the movies, and have the whole afternoon ahead of you!

7/14/2006 11:03:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Scoble on Soccer

Robert Scoble has an interesting comment regarding making soccer more popular in the United States. He says HDTV will do that.

I agree strongly. One of the reasons I bought an HDTV set 3 years ago was my experience watching a basketball game on an HDTV at the store. All of a sudden, the game wasn’t boring: I could see the whole court, and where the players were positioning themselves. It added a whole new dimension to the game, one I had only previously experienced at a live basketball game.  As I think I’ve said before, soccer is a lot like basketball: the real action isn’t around the ball, its the positioning of the other players. Being able to see them in HD-widescreen made the World Cup games much more enjoyable.

7/10/2006 9:43:58 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

An interesting article
Donald Sensing has an interesting article concerning alternative energy. He brings up a very good point: the real issue regarding global warming isn’t whether its real or not (or even whether people cause it or not), it’s what to do about it. Short of extreme hand waving, its a hard problem to fix.
7/7/2006 2:03:07 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics | world affairs

The weirdness of racism

So, Sony’s in trouble for “racist” advertising. Now, I find this to be a very offensive picture. Whomever thought this up should have their head examined.

Then, I thought, if the figures were reversed, would it have affected me the same way. I’m sorry to say, probably not. What do you think?

And, to Sony: This is a great way to sell X-Boxes. Get your collective act together.

7/6/2006 10:11:56 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

I saw Superman Returns

This weekend, I saw Superman Returns. The movie pretty much lives up to all the critical hype that’s been thrown about. It’s at least as good as the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies, and possibly better than them. In fact, the movie is a sequel of sorts to them, using bits of history from those movies. At first, I was pretty leery of this concept. There’s been a lot of story development around Superman in the years since those movies came out, and I was hoping to see some of that included in this movie. Returning to the storyline of those old movies seemed a step backward.  In actuality, it worked out well. Instead of spending a lot of time developing the Superman “backstory”, the movie could just refer to its built-in history and move on.

All in all, this is a definite must-see. If you enjoyed the first two Superman movies (we’ll all ignore the other two), you should love this as well.

By the way, there was one interesting casting crossover: Superman’s father, Jor-El, was once again “played” by Marlon Brando! Pretty good for a dead man!

7/5/2006 3:28:18 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Iron Man is so misunderstood

Today, John Campea, in the Movie Blog, was saying that Iron Man is just a Batman knock off. Now, I don’t want to say that he doesn’t know Iron Man, but he doesn’t.

There are some fascinating twists to the Iron Man story.

First of all, Iron Man has a “day job” as the bodyguard of his public identity, Tony Stark. This means that Iron Man’s always getting pulled into Tony Stark related stuff.

Second, Bruce Wayne is a playboy/philanthropist; Tony Stark is an industrialist/weapons manufacturer. As above, this means that storylines tent to focus on his company, Stark Industries, as opposed to the kind of “general crime fighting” that Batman is up to.

I’m hoping that the upcoming Iron Man movie will be “true” to the character’s origins and have a plot around Stark Industries, industrial espionage, and global terrorism. This is where the Iron Man character really shines.

That alcoholism stuff they pulled was lame beyond lame; they never should have gone there. It was very un-Iron Man.

Finally, you want to talk “Batman knock-off”? Let’s talk Green Arrow!

6/23/2006 4:06:56 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Portland BarCamp anyone?

This weekend is the San Francisco BarCamp. What’s BarCamp, you ask? BarCamp is yet another form of the un-conference (like Code Camp). The thing that’s different about BarCamp is its only for participants. So, it breaks the speaker/audience model, even further than Code Camp does. Everyone presents (or at least participates in presentations), so its more of a peer gathering.  You can find more information on BarCamps here and there’s a “BarCamp for Dummies Newbies” here.

I’m wondering if this would be a neat thing for the Portland area… Any takers?

6/23/2006 9:25:39 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general | development

New Palm, part 2

Well, I’ve been using my Palm TX for a while now, and while I’m still annoyed about how hard it was to get going (are you listening, Palm? and why can’t I tell you about that directly?), my actual experience is terrific. I’ve got all the software I use regularly installed, and even was able to find a new video playing program (open source / freeware this time) that is better than what I had on my LifeDrive.

And, due to recommendations at work, I’m finally giving Rhapsody a try. It took me a while to get used to the interface, but so far I’m liking it. My boss had a good point: the music I listen to changes over time, so why not just “rent” it via a monthly charge? My MP3 player on my TX also works directly with Rhapsody, so loading musing into it is easy.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the purchase now. In fact, I cancelled the MP3 player that’s been on backorder for a week now.

I’m listening to Bruce Springsteen right now. Excellent.

6/15/2006 11:11:34 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

A movie that wasn't as bad as I expected

Yesterday, desperate for something new to watch on TV, I watched the remake of  The Stepford Wives. At first, I found the movie annoying in its one-sidedness. After a while, I began to see that the one sidedness was part of the story, and started ignoring it. Once I did that, the movie was almost entertaining (yes, I said “almost”).

Near the end of the picture, in the first “revelation scene”, I realized that the movie was fundamentally a “role reversal” picture. By switching the gender roles around, the story made a lot more sense, and was a lot more “sinister” in nature. It definitely wouldn’t have been made that way, but it was interesting to look at the picture from that angle.

The final twist was also interesting and one I didn’t expect at all. I won’t describe it so not to spoil the picture for anyone masochistic enough to choose to watch it.

All in all, the final resolution showed some nice balance, though not enough to make the picture into anything but a bad remake. I did think it was interesting that a movie making a statement about the subjugation of women (if that was what they were trying to do, its hard to say) only had one actor with star billing: Nichole Kidman. Even Matthew Broderick was relegated to billing “under the title”.

As a side note, what’s with these remakes that either ridicule (Stepford Wives, Starsky and Hutch) or ignore (all the MI’s) the originals? It’s a safe bet that the folks making these movies weren’t fans of the originals, and they’re basically just cashing in on the name recognition, or are they trying to “say” something more significant? If they are, they’re doing a lousy job of it.

6/12/2006 5:03:34 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

Palm Postscript
I tried to send my previous post directly to Palm, and found that there was no way to do that. Hopefully, they’ll find my post directly. Not a high hope though.
6/12/2006 11:27:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology | general

New Palm, new adventure

I’ve been having “slowdown” issues with my Palm LifeDrive. It’s a great PDA/MP3 player, but has a huge flaw: Palm decided to treat the HD storage like internal (Flash) RAM instead of as external storage. This means that applications are stored in it and must be swapped to RAM to run. This causes a noticeable delay at both startup and when switching applications, and can be really annoying when all you want to do is check your appointments for the day.

I considered just resurrecting my T3, since I was happy with it (other than having decent MP3 capability). However, I realized that I’d miss having WiFi capability (the T3 only has Bluetooth). I remembered that Palm now had the TX model out, and sure enough, it has both Bluetooth and WiFi built in. It also has 100 MB of (available) Flash RAM, so it sounded like a serviceable MP3 player too (like the LifeDrive, it comes with MP3 player software). Since the price was right, I went for it and picked one up.

It turns out that the TX has a few flaws in its OS … Everything went well until I tried to synch up with my LifeDrive’s backup: the synch locked up in the middle, and the TX started resetting repeatedly. The only way I could stop it was to reset it back to factory defaults.

Now, a little history. I’ve been using a Palm OS device since the Palm IIIx days in the mid ‘90s (gadzooks! just about 10 years!). I’ve gone through several “device transfers”, and they’ve all gone without a hitch. Even when there were hardware / OS changes, the system was smart enough to handle it without any major work on my part. So, this reset problem was extremely unwelcome.

I did some Googling on the problem, and found a couple of articles on how to handle it. Apparently, mine was not an isolated case. Plan A and plan B both failed (soft reset, hard reset). Plan C finally got the device working (reset to factory defaults, remove all backup records from the HotSynch database before synching up for the first time). Then, I had to load the missing applicatons piecemeal from my old backup. After a few hours of work, I (finally) have a working TX with my old data intact.

Then, I ran into my next hurdle: While the Life Drive will work as a virtual disk drive through its hotsynch cable, the TX doesn’t. I was surprised by this, since its a standard feature of Palm’s only real competitor, Microsoft. Luckily, I found a third party app (kudos to the Palm development community; they’re the main reason I’ve stuck with Palm over the years) that provides virtual drive support to the external SD card. This actually provides me with potentially MORE storage than I could have had with the Palm’s Flash RAM, since I can get up to at least a 1 GB SD card into that slot. This is MORE space than I was using on my Life Drive.

Anyway, today I’m finally up and running on the TX. So far, now that my startup pain is over, its living up to its promise: its nice and snappy, and has all the nice features that I used with the Life Drive. As an added bonus, the Grafitti 2 interface seems to work better with the TX than it did with the Life Drive. Frankly, I have mixed feelings about the current Palm devices. Both the TX and the Life Drive before it showed a much lower level of quality than the previous units. Frankly, I’d be switching to a Windows Mobile device, except I have experience with it as well, and the quality there is even lower: Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand the handheld market anywhere near as well as Palm does. So, I’m sticking with Palm for the duration, hoping and praying that they get their technological act together. Needless to say, that I’ll be sharing this story with anyone interested in hearing it…

6/12/2006 10:54:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology | general

WinFX is dead, long live .NET Framework 3.0
It looks like Microsoft finally found a “product naming person” with a clue. They’ve decided NOT to call the (next) version of the .NET Framework “WinFX” after all, opting for the much more sensible “.NET Framework 3.0”. Okay, so it still a terrible name (try Googling “.NET” and see what you get!), but at least it has some continuity with what’s come before. We’ve been living with the “.NET” name since before 2002.
6/9/2006 5:08:21 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

Pixar's next
I just saw the trailer for Pixar’s next movie, Ratatuille, and it looks good great! I’m lukewarm about Cars, it looks too much like an old Chevron commercial to me. But, Ratatuille looks like its back to greatness for Pixar!
6/9/2006 9:23:36 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

I'm on the fence about the Akaka Bill

Dan Akaka, junior senator from Hawaii, submitted a bill to essentially award the Native Hawaiian federal status similar to that given to Native Americans, including Eskimos.

The bill was narrowly defeated via a Cloture vote today (Cloture votes prevent filibustering).

I’m on the fence about this bill. Originally, I was against it. It sounded like rewriting history. What happened in Hawaii was nothing like what happened to the Native Americans; that was more like one nation (the various Native American tribes) being overrun by another nation (the good ole US of A). Most people are probably unaware, that the Constitution specifically talks about Native American issues and specifically treats them as “foreign nations”. Native Americans weren’t considered “citizens” of the United States until the 20th century.

The case of Hawaii was more like that of Texas: Citizens of the country (Mexico in the case of Texas, the Kingdom of Hawaii in the case of Hawaii) broke away or overthrew the existing government and set up their own “Republic” in place of it. In both the Hawaiian an Texan cases, there was some degree of unofficial U.S. involvement in the governmental change.

In the case of Hawaii, certain lands were passed over to the Federal Government for their administration (these were lands originally held by the rulers of Hawaii, that the subsequent Republic of Hawaii also held in trust). The US government has been managing these lands since then, but not as reservations; Native Hawaiians have always had the same citizenship rights as all other residents / citizens of Hawaii.

According to Senator Akaka’s web page, his bill would just add more formality to the relationship between the Federal Government and the Native Hawaiian people, placing the management of the lands in the Department of the Interior (where Native American lands are administered) and establishing some sort of working relationship between the Federal Government and the Native Hawaiian. It specifically disallows any question of land seizure or even creation of Casinos on Native Hawaiian land. These were amendments added because of concerns expressed by various other Senators.

This sounded pretty benign to me: the Feds already had some sort of acknowledged special relationship with Native Hawaiian, this just added more structure to that relationship.

But, Senator Akaka talked about issues like the Native Hawaiian “deciding” whether to have a monarchy or not. So, this sounds more like the creation of a special, ethnic shadow government for Native Hawaiian. The State of Hawaii tried this before, creating the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.

So, I’m on the fence here. Frankly, I think the Hawaiian politicians are just pandering to the liberal constituency of their state, rewriting history by accepting that the United States government overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii. This seems to be slowly becoming the “conventional wisdom” in the state, and its just wrong.

Native Hawaiian activists like to talk about how :“their land” was “stolen” from them, but to this date, the largest private land owner in the state is a Native Hawaiian trust, the Bishop Estate. And there are many other wealthy Native Hawaiian families as well. Also, before those “thieving” white people had their way, it was impossible for common people to own land in Hawaii; Hawaii used a feudal system where land was controlled solely by their nobility, not by the common folk.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I feel better.

6/8/2006 5:17:31 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

"White on White" racism in America: a perspective

One thing that gets very little press today in the talk of immigration reform is the history of “White on White” racism in the United States. I was doing a little “audit” in my head, and was shocked by the results: There are three European ethnic groups that come to my mind when I think of “White on White” prejudice: the Polish, the Italians, and the Irish. Guess what these three groups have in common? They’re (by and large) Catholic. Now, there’s something I hadn’t anticipated.

Guess who’s also (by and large) Catholic? Yes, Hispanics. What gives?

6/7/2006 2:20:24 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Horror of the Character Actors

John Campea of The Movie Blog just reviewed The Breakup, and said some interesting things. I won’t go into his review; just follow the link if you’re interested. I will say this much: its not the usual review of this picture.

However, some of what he said got me thinking: He likes Vince Vaughn in the movie, but says that we might be getting tired of him. Vince basically just “plays” Vince. This sounds very familiar. It reminds me of Jim Carrey. The same thing: in comedies, Jim just plays Jim. No muss, no fuss.

In the old days, guys like these two would have a comfortable career as character actors. Whenever a producer would say “Get me a Vince Vaughn type”, his casting director would just call Vince’s agent and see if he was available. Vince would show up, be Vince on screen, and everybody would be happy. If you watch old movies, like I do, you know that there are a ton of folks in them who fall into this category. You probably have no idea of their names, but you always recognize them when they walk on screen. I recently saw Charles Coburn in Carey Grant’s Monkey Business; he’s one of these guys.

Unfortunately, we live in different times. Guys like Vince and Jim who have no range or depth to their performances are getting star billing, that’s just wearing out whatever distinctiveness they have. Don’t get me wrong; I like Vince Vaughn, and I used to like Jim Carrey (before he became over-used and over-hyped). I just think this new system does both the actors and the audience a disservice.

6/5/2006 4:22:02 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

My opinions on Batman bad guys

The Movie Blog just said that Spider-Man 3 will have 4 villains, and John was quick to express his displeasure. In solidarity with his opinion (considering that I still haven’t seen Spider-Man 2), here’s my comments on the Batman movie franchise, that (in my opinion) started this whole multi-villain thing.

1. Batman: one villain (that counted): the Joker (Jack Nicholson). He stole the show, which was bad (remember the title of this movie?), but not a bad picture, overall.

2. Batman Returns: two villains (that counted, forget about Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck). Bad move. People (Tim Burton, that is) were sidetracked with Jack’s over the top performance in the previous movie, and thought that it would take 2 villains to fill his shoes: bad idea stacked on bad idea. Catwoman was enough of a character. The dual story of Bruce Wayne’s relationship with Selena Kyle and Batman’s relationship with Catwoman would’ve been terrific, but they blew it by adding the cartoonish Penguin character.

3. Batman Forever: two villains (again!). After the Joker, Two-Face is one of the best villains in the Batman genre. And, they totally ignored him so that they could latch onto Jim Carrey’s rising star, playing The Riddler. The Riddler was a small-time villain in the comic, made big by Frank Gorshen’s great TV performance. To add insult to injury, Tommy Lee Jones was playing Two-Face! Now, come on, one of the best actors of modern times, and you ignore him! This focus on what was basically a TV-villain would be a harbinger for the next Batman travesty…

4. Batman and Robin: two villains (and three! heroes). The “ensemble cast” would have been bad enough, but the sheer campiness played pseudo-seriously was downright disgusting. Building on the wholly inappropriate Riddler debacle, this movie tried to cash in on Alicia Silverstone’s rising popularity by casting her as Batgirl in this farce. There should’ve been just one villain (either Mr. Freeze or Poison Ivy would have worked), and the movie should have concentrated on the relationship between Batman and Robin (again, remember the title????). This movie almost killed the franchise. Joel Schumaker should never be allowed to make a movie again!

5. Batman Begins: two villains (but, one at a time!). Finally, Batman done right! Even better than the original movie: this one centered around the title character instead of allowing the villains to steal the show. The two villains were there to support the main character, instead of chewing up the screen with their own drama; excellent. And, that plot twist about Ras Al Ghul at the end was brilliant!

So, now, 4 villains in Spider-Man 3. I can hear the cash register now: cha-ching! In a bigger sense, I think its a sign that Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst can’t carry the picture. Especially since they’ve decided to add Gwen Stacey to the mix. This shrieks of Batman and Robin all over again…

6/5/2006 10:48:38 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

My comments on "the worst sequels of all time"

The Movie Blog just posted Entertainment Weekly’s list of the top 25 worst sequels of all time. I figured I’d add my 2 cents as comments…

25. The Matrix Reloaded: Never saw it. Haven’t missed it.
24. The Next Karate Kid: The downhill slide started with KK Part III. I though that this was better than III, I was sorry they didn’t do a sequel to this one.
23. Porky’s II: yeah, a piece of junk.
22. Teen Wolf Too: Teen Wolf itself wasn’t much of a movie. They actually pulled it off the shelf when Back to the Future turned out to be a hit. But, yeah, this was a loser.
21. Legally Blonde 2: Not so great, but not as bad as some say. After all, the first one wasn’t exactly Oscar material.
20. Godfather Part III: A good movie, but not a good sequel. It was better as a stand-alone movie than as a capper to the previous two.
19. Revenge of the Nerds II: This didn’t need to be made.
18. Battle for the Planet of the Apes: All POA movies after the second were junk. As was the remake.
17. Star Trek V: Yeah, it was bad, but not as bad as the first (yawn) one was.
16. Ocean’s Twelve: Still haven’t seen it, but as a sequel to a remake of a really bad film, how bad could it be (relatively speaking)?
15. Dumb and Dumberer: I like the name. I didn’t even watch the first one.
14. Conan the Destroyer: yeah, yuck.
13. The Sting II. I didn’t think anybody remembered this. Jackie Gleason playing a Paul Newman role? Come on!
12. Star Wars Episode I: Episode II was even worse.
11. Dirty Dancing Havana Nights: “Nobody puts Baby in…” oh, wrong movie. Yeah, who cares?
10. Jaws The Revenge: Didn’t like the first one, thought that this one was silly, though Jaws 3D was worse, I’m sure.
 9. Speed 2: Another one I missed (on purpose)
 8. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Didn’t watch any of these. I guess you had to be there…
 7. The Fly 2: Hey, this was just on TV! No, didn’t like the remake either.
 6. Weekend at Bernie’s II: I was amazed they made this after the original.
 5. Batman & Robin: Almost killed the franchise, it was that bad. And it could have been sooo good. George Clooney was robbed.
 4. Blues Brothers 2000: Amen.
 3. Leprechaun Back 2 tha Hood: What? they made a SEQUEL??? sheesh.
 2. Caddyshack II: Yeah. It had all the bad parts of the original and none of the good parts. It even had some new bad parts.
 1. Staying Alive: The only good thing about this movie was that it was bad enough to prevent a third “Fever” movie from being made.

5/31/2006 3:41:22 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

No X-men spoilers here
Did you notice that I didn’t directly mention any of the X-men plot? Boy, that was hard. I have a lot to say about what happens in the movie, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone that hasn’t seen it yet (I think this is a sign of just how good the movie is. After all, I really wouldn’t be motivated to reveal much about the movie if it was bad). If I remember, and am so inclined, I’ll post something next month. If anyone wants to discuss it before then, drop me an e-mail.
5/31/2006 2:28:58 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

X-men 3

I saw X-men 3 last night. This was a big deal for me, since I generally don’t go to the theater to see movies, instead waiting for them to come to DVD. In fact, the last movie I saw in the theater was  The Incredibles in 2004.

The movie was excellent. It wasn’t Oscar-worthy, by any means. And there were a lot of plot twists that I didn’t particularly care for (being a fan of the X-men comic from way back). However, it was very entertaining, I’d say the best of the three movies.

I disagree with those speculating on an X-men 4 though. I think that would be a big mistake. X-men 3 pretty much ends the story for the X-men. Of course, a Wolverine movie wouldn’t be out of the question…

And by the way, I saw the Superman trailer (interesting watching a trailer for a DC comic character before a Marvel comic character movie). I’m feeling better about Superman Returns now. I still don’t like the fact that they’re building on the old movies instead of doing a more updated story, but it looks like it’s going to be good too.

And (finally) Ghost Rider looks like it’s going to be really good. Nicholas Cage makes a much better Johnny Blaze than a Superman (he was the original choice for the Superman role in what became Superman Returns).

5/31/2006 9:23:42 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

So far, bad reviews for the Da Vinci Code movie

The early reviews of the movie are in, and they’re not good.

Urban Cinefile said, “There might be a riveting adventure thriller to be made from Dan Brown's controversial bestseller, but this is not it. Melodramatic, overlong and dare I say occasionally boring, Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code gets lost in the maze of its puzzles and media”.

Sounds a lot like the book to me. I guess Ron Howard was true to the source.

5/17/2006 1:52:10 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Superman disappointment

I watched the Superman trailer recently, and was very disappointed. It looks like they’re basically writing (yet another) sequel to the ‘70s & ‘80s movies instead of finding their own vision. That was over 20 years ago, guys. There’s been a lot of character development in the Superman genre. Frankly, if they were going to do something derivative, they should be looking at the Superman animated series. It had a much more “modern” view of Superman, Lois Lane, and Metropolis as a whole. While, I’m sure the movie will do well (they’re already planning the sequel!), I was hoping for more of a “Batman Begins” approach, where they would show off a new facet of the Superman character.

Oh well. That’s Hollywood for you.

5/16/2006 10:19:17 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Microsoft has (finally) released Web Application Project (WAP) 1.0

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before. The Web development interface in VS 2005 is vastly different than that in VS 2003. I’d say gratuitously different. My .NET study group took a look at it when VS 2005 first came out and were thoroughly confused by it.

Well, for whatever reason, Microsoft has been working on a thing called the “Web Application Project” for VS 2005. It adds a project type very similar to the VS 2003 Web project, but takes advantage of .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 features. (I’d like to think that its because they realized the error of their ways, but come on. this is Microsoft.

According to Scott Guthrie, this will be part of the VS 2005 SP1, and will continue to be supported in the future as part of VS 2005.

Well, version 1.0 is now released.

5/9/2006 8:51:01 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

May Day

…

I just looked down at my desk calendar and noticed that today is “Early May Bank Holiday” in Ireland. So, “Happy Irish Early May Bank Holiday!” Boy, those Irish sure can name ‘em!

On a related note, as all Hawaiian school children know, May Day is Lei Day in Hawaii (this is a song that school age children get to / are forced to sing at Hawaiian school pageants. So, to all you readers, Happy May Day. May all your May Days be Lei Days  .

5/1/2006 10:42:17 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

God

Lately, Scott Adams (of Dilbert) has been on a God/religion jag. His latest question/statement is (edited): do you believe in (1) Psychics? (2) God? (not a multiple choice, this is a two-parter.)

The Psychic thing I’ll leave alone.Scott seems to want to draw parallels between the two, and that just muddies the waters further.

As far as belief in God goes, this is an interesting conundrum. If someone believes in God, this is pretty straightforward. They say “yes, I believe in God, and here’s what I believe about God…”. Now, if someone says that they don’t believe in God, they then have to define what they don’t believe in. This generally goes something like “I don’t believe that God is an old, white man with a long flowing beard.” or “If a benevolent God exists, why is there so much strife in the world?”.

So, here’s the thing: what if we defined God to be “the force that causes the Earth to revolve around the Sun”. Now, who “believes” in God? Perhaps someone could argue that they don’t believe that this force is God, but then how is their opinion relevant when they’ve already said that they don’t believe in God?

So, the way I see it, people who believe in God have defined God in a believable (at least to themselves) way. People who don’t, have defined God as something not believable. So, its less about “belief” and more about definitions, and a “desire” to believe.

 

4/21/2006 9:52:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Free Will? Free Willy? Free Beer?

Scott Adams, in his Dilbert Blog, has been talking about Free Will lately. He chalks up people’s belief in it to “superstition”, but I suspect that his reliance on science to define his reality is also “superstitious”. Nevertheless, I recommend reading this, it’s very thought provoking.

By the way, if you do read his posts, I (personally) don’t believe that random numbers really exist: They’re a useful fabrication / model that simplifies the work of mathematicians and scientists.

Frankly, I think that anyone who discusses “reality” in any meaningful way is just fooling themselves.

4/11/2006 8:58:56 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Interesting legacies

I just finished listening to Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech (TWIT) and Scott Hanselman’s Hanselminutes. I think its interesting that both of these “cutting edge” “technology shows” include theme music. This is sort of a hold over from radio shows, and now television (though some television shows play with the format, placing the theme music later and later in the program. The theme music doesn’t really add anything to the program, since its self contained anyway. It’s not like we need something to inform us that the show is coming. And yet, the programs would seem less professional if they were missing.

As an aside: yes, this is one of the ways I get my tech news. I think its fantastic that I can simply download these shows to my Palm LifeDrive without the hassle of dealing with TV or radio networks.

3/24/2006 4:43:09 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general

I've made the change

Well, I’ve gone and done it.

I’ve installed Comcast’s DVR. I haven’t retired my ReplayTV units, instead I’ve added the Comcast unit. While not as good as ReplayTV in some ways, it’s much better in others (like, being available for instance  ). It handles conflicts much more rationally than the ReplayTV software does. And, as an extra bonus, I can watch both HD channels and OnDemand again (for some reason, they wouldn’t work with my ReplayTV plugged in to the cable box).

As soon as I get my new 8 way amplified splitter, I’ll be in hog heaven with a total of 5 (five!) recorders hooked up (the Comcast unit can actually record 2 shows at the same time!) I’m not missing anything now!

3/22/2006 7:20:10 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

So, what's smaller than monogamy?

I’m reading a lot of “chatter” about polygamy on the internet, in large part thanks to HBO’s new show, “Big Love”. I think its interesting that a lot of the “anti-polygamy” sites are connecting legalized polygamy to legalized gay marriage. Now, to be fair, I’m all for gay marriage; but I’ve mentioned the same argument. After all, if you’re for gay marriage based on the “privacy” issue (what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is their business, and the government should stay out of it) or the “religious” issue (separation of church and state prohibits the government from criminalizing something simply because one or more religions consider it sinful), then what about polygamy or (consensual) incest? Why should it be legal for two unrelated guys to be married but not a brother and a sister? Or, for that matter, two brothers (no “genetic” problem there)?

That’s not really related to the title of this piece.

What is related, is the (supposed) fact that (as of 2000), 16% of all households (in America, I assume) are single parent ones. Over the years, single parenthood has become more mainstream. In fact, we consider single parent families “legitimate” today. So, what kind of marriage is this? It’s not monogamy, and certainly not polygamy. Just where do these families fall in the taxonomy? And is it relevant?

As for me, I’m all for heterosexual marriage, gay marriage, polygamy, etc. The issue is about stable families, not who’s hopping into bed with whom. What about you?

3/22/2006 4:26:05 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general

Microsoft: changing direction without changing direction

In Computerworld today, Bill Gates is quoted as saying that MS waited too long for a new browser release. Yeah, I guess it’s “too long” when you start working on the next release after you’ve announced that there will be no new versions of the browser  . Okay, okay. They said “stand alone versions” of the browser. Of course, IE 7 will be available for XP. That sounds pretty stand-alone to me.

Anyway.

I think it’s interesting that this time MS is spinning this as a late, but intended change rather than a huge shift in strategy, like their move to the internet was in the ‘90s. This is a company that spent two years trying to convince the development community that web development was dead, and their “one click” technology would replace it. Of course, they changed their tune when the community started beating the AJAX drum. They quickly announced their own “AJAX product”: Atlas.

More and more, I’m thinking that Microsoft’s 15 minutes of technological leadership are over. However, I’m more than a little nervous about what/who comes next.

3/21/2006 9:29:01 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | general

Daria sighting

Okay, maybe sighting isn’t the right word, since she was heard, not seen, but…

I just got a voice message from Alan. He thought that he’d heard Daria O’Neal on 105.1. I just checked out their web site, and sure enough, Daria’s back on the radio! Bravo to The Buzz for recognizing real talent.

3/18/2006 7:23:43 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Linux becons

Today the Daily Grind announced a new GUI designer in MonoDevelop.  Seeing this, I’m sorely tempted to try out Linux and Mono…

Though, judging from the pic, I’ll have to brush up on my Spanish .

3/8/2006 9:05:54 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

Origami (not the paper)

There’s a lot of buzz on the ‘net regarding Origami, Microsoft’s new, yet to be unveiled, project. From what folks are saying, it could be a re-do of the “smart display” product that they (in their infinite wisdom) rolled out with the Tablet PC that died a painful death.

The smart display was a weird product, a Windows CE device that worked as a wireless terminal off of another PC. At the time, there didn’t seem to be much interest in it. Of course (other than Microsoft themselves), there really hasn’t been any real interest in the Tablet PC either.

Now, I loved the idea of the smart display, and was looking forward to getting one. I could theoretically write .NET apps that would run on it in terminal mode, and not have to deal with Compact Framework at all. I was sadly disappointed with the smart display went nowhere.

So, I have high hopes for Origami…

3/6/2006 11:34:32 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Daria O'Neal

I was listening to MP3’s this weekend, and one of Daria O’Neal’s Local Entertainment Guide recordings played. It reminded me how much I used to like listening to her radio show. Frankly, the only reason I listened to KNRK in the morning was because of her. And her Entertainment Guides were fabulous. I saw her recently on KPDX doing show intros, but they’re nowhere as good as her radio show was. Frankly, I think any radio station in the Portland area would be doing themselves a big favor to put her back on  the air.

3/5/2006 10:31:22 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

The Status Quo

It occurred to me today, we all seem to expect that things will not change, that the way things are is the way things will be. Even in times of great upheaval, our feeling seems to be that the upheaval will continue (New Orleans will continue to be under water?). Until, of course, it stops. Then that becomes what we expect.

When American companies started outsourcing their IT and other services (including a fair bit of engineering) to India, this became the “death” of the American high tech industry. All high tech jobs worth having were going to be exported to other countries. Instead, today, jobs are moving back to the U.S. from overseas, and (according to Newsweek), there are 17 percent more tech jobs in the United States today than there were in 1999.

We’re doing the same thing regarding the Iraq war. More and more people are saying that the war is “unwinnable”. Their only “evidence” of this is what’s happened recently, assuming that the future will be identical. The one thing we can be sure of regarding Iraq is that the future will be different than the present. The big question will be “different in what way?”.

3/1/2006 1:49:45 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

The whitening of America

What follows is just my impression, no links & no references. Your mileage may vary…

There seems to be a trend in America now that is “whitening” people. As a frame of reference, keep in mind that, generally, when an American refers to a person as “white”, what this is synonymous with (though they may be unaware of this fact) is “white anglo-saxon protestant”. That’s because most non-ethnic Americans can’t tell the difference. Back in the dark days of the early 20th century, when white supremacists were pushing their brand of racial intolerance as “science”, all the various ethnic groups were categorized in order of advancement, with white anglo-saxon protestants being on top, and black sub-saharan africans being on the bottom. All the other various ethnic groups stretched between the two, so that your typical supremacist of the time knew just how superior to feel about them.

Today, this is considered “racist”. Okay, it is racist, but (in my opinion) the current attitude is also racist.

Today the attitude seems to be that African Americans are “black” (which is not bad) and everybody else is “white” (which can be bad). Note that this is an American attitude, not a black or white American attitude, though its generally held by the non-ethnic Americans. Those of use with ethnic identity tend to not see the world in this way, instead seeing the multitude of cultures out there and understanding that they’re all different.

Now, I don’t know what to do about this, except to make sure that whatever children you have are raised in a “properly” ethnic community, where people know their roots, and don’t see a problem with that. I think that way too many people in America are trying to act “white” or “black” (whichever piece of America they identify with).

2/3/2006 4:06:01 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

The next great fuel?

digg pointed me to an article in CNN Money today on replacing gasoline with ethanol. It was an interesting read. For the record, I think we need a real replacement for oil as soon as possible. It was oil that drove the technological boom of the 20th century, and until we come up with a fuel source that tops it in what I call “energy density”, we’re never going to make the kind of jump we did before.

That being said, it seems that ethanol is poised to replace gasoline as an automobile fuel. This could be quite interesting, at least for the short term.

 

1/30/2006 11:04:41 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Wal-Mart and Academia

Via Instapundit (I do like that Instapundit ), James Joyner has an interesting article comparing Wal-Mart and academia. Part of the article noted that a new Wal-Mart store in the Chicago area attracted 25,000 applications for 325 openings. That’s 25 thousand. An interesting sideline to this bit is that, apparently, the Chicago city council recently turned down Wal-Mart’s request to build a store in the city limits due to public pressure. Instead, Wal-Mart built the store just outside the city limits, and the only real difference is the loss of tax revenues to the city of Chicago.

Back to the main point of all of this. The anti-Wal-Mart folks seem to fall into two groups: the union organizers (who dislike any non-union enterprises, especially successful ones) and high paid folks to think that “those people” (the ones who work at Wal-Mart and possibly shop at Wal-Mart) are being taken advantage of.

Now, I understand the issue of small companies being driven out of business by Wal-Marts moving in to an area. However, this is nothing new. Way back when (in Hawaii, we refer to this as our “small kid days”), we had meat markets, and fish markets, and produce markets. You literally shopped around to get everything that a family needed for daily living. Then along came the Super Markets (notice the name). They basically killed all of those specialty shops, mainly because they could leverage cost and offer the same goods at a lower price than the smaller stores. I don’t see anyone protesting against Safeway, Albertson’s, or Kroger’s (Fred Meyer up here in the Northwest).

So, why this ill feeling toward Wal-Mart? The trend is no different than the Super Market trend of the 1950’s, and as James Joyner says, no different than what people face in academia too.

 

 

1/27/2006 5:47:53 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Honesty in journalism - What a concept!

Today, Joel Stein wrote a column titled Warriors and Wusses. In it he says something very honest: “… I’m not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken…”.

Bravo (at least half-way) to Joel for telling it like it is. At last, someone on the anti-war side who tells it like it is. You can’t (honestly) be against the war, but for the people performing the war. Come on!

Now, let me be up front here. I’m for the war. Before the war started, I felt that we had worked ourselves into a “fish or cut bait” situation: We either had to accept that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq (sound familiar? 20/20 hindsight out there?), pick up our toys, and go home… or we had to accept that we had to go to the next step and invade. To be honest, I never expected the President to invade. I expected what we saw during the 8 years of the Clinton administration (and to be honest, the end of Bush 43’s administration): lots of sabre rattling followed by us backing down. But, once the decision had been made, it can’t be unmade: we’re there for the duration.

Back to the central point of this rant: The armed forces in Iraq are doing what they believe their duty is. By and large, they believe that they are doing the right thing. If you think they aren’t, then you’re not supporting them! Be honest about it. As Joel says, this doesn’t mean that you need to spit on them when they come home (as happened way too much during Vietnam), just be honest with them about what they’re doing.

And I’ll continue to disagree with you about that, and support the war…

1/24/2006 11:09:19 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  politics | general

The new Low-Rent Huffington Post

By the way, I noticed that in many cases, The Huffington Post is now just linking to stories in other electronic news sites. Looks like they’re in a slide downward. Too bad.

1/23/2006 4:01:38 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Geese and ganders

Norman Solomon has an interesting article in the Huffington Post regarding leaks, the Plame case, and the NSA case.

He treats both cases as simply political issues and trivializes their legal impact.

He ends by assuming that journalists will either be on the “side” of the “truth” or “powerful government officials”, and completely misses the “side” of the “large corporate interests” held by most media outlets. Let’s not forget that the New York Times sat on the NSA story until they could get the best monetary gain from it.

Frankly, I don’t buy the idea that newspaper writers (supposed “journalists”) and TV news writers are somehow entitled to special shielding from the government. IMHO, Freedom of the Press is a right shared by all americans, and grants all of us the freedom to publish, in print and otherwise.

1/23/2006 3:58:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

American Idol hypocrisy

I know, most of you couldn’t give a flying fig about American Idol, and the idea of someone associated with the show being a “hypocrite” probably fills you with smug glee. But still, this torques me…

Kelly Clarkson, the first American Idol winner, has refused to allow any of the songs off her latest album used on American Idol. Now, her manager says that she doesn’t allow any outside use of these songs, so she’s not singling out American Idol for especially bad behavior.

As a result Simon Cowell, the American Idol judge, has publicly scolded her for this, saying “I think that by ignoring the show you're ignoring the audience who put you there”. Simon seems to have completely forgotten his own contractual dispute with American Idol, including his refusal to appear in the latest season (After negotiation, he changed his tune). What a hypocrite. Any opportunities that he’s had in the U.S. has been directly related to his appearance on the show, and he has more reason to be grateful for what the show has done for his career than Ms. Clarkson. Simon seems to be of the opinion that since he’s “stuck” with the show, everybody should be “stuck” with the show.

And, for the record, I agree with her alleged comments that the show stuck her with terrible songwriters. They did. The quality of the music on her first CD’s was nowhere as good as the quality of her singing, either on the CD’s or on the original show. It was a great disappointment for me, being a big fan of hers. Bo Bice (the latest runner-up) said something similar. He was happy that he didn’t win, because he hand more freedom to select his music by being the runner-up.

1/18/2006 12:15:20 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  general | TV

Who's Antonin Scalia trying to kid?

Today, the Supreme Court released its ruling on Gonzalez vs Oregon, John Ashcroft’s parting shot at Oregon’s assisted suicide law. The decision was 6–3, in favor of Oregon (yay). When I first heard about this (on the morning news), I wondered who the 6 were and who the 3 were.

First, I figured that Scalia was probably one of the three (and his buddy Thomas), but then I thought, Scalia says he’s an originalist, and the Founding Fathers had no intention that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution would allow Congress to regulate drugs. So, he had to be in the majority on this issue.

duh.

As it turns out, he was one of the three: Scalia, Thomas (what a surprise, he voted the same as Scalia), and Roberts (he showed signs of this during the testimony).

So, who’s Scalia trying to kid with this originalist nonsense? The only time he cares about what the Founding Fathers intended, is when that belief supports his own ideology.

1/17/2006 11:16:31 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  politics | general

Name dropping, the geek version

As many of you know, I’m an MMORPG player. The game used to be Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC), but since it saw the light of day, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (WoW). IMHO, WoW is a much better system than DAOC is. I’ve even convinced my DAOC guild (what was left of it after 6 months of WoW) to switch to WoW. We’re all having a ball over at WoW (free plug, Blizzard!). But this is just an intro, not what I wanted to blog about.

Recently, through my RSS news reader, I found a site called WoW Blogs. It’s a great touch, a site dedicated to blogs “by” characters on World of Warcraft. it give players a real outlet to fill in the “story lines” of their characters. Hey, I can’t wait to get my own series of blogs for my characters. But that’s not it either.

I got to this site via Kazpah’s blog. Her player has her own blog, and pointed me to this one. One character she writes about a lot is Jonkichi, so recently, I popped to his blog and read it. It was quite good. Less “in character” than Kazpah’s, which is fabulous (especially if you play a Warlock character, I play two ), but he gave a good feel for what it was like to be in on a really “large scale” adventure (40 characters!). I just clicked on a link from his WoW Blog to his “real life” blog, and got a shock: it was Joi Ito! Joi’s a long time blogger; I’ve been reading about him, as well as (at various times) his blog for years! I was completely taken aback by discovering that he’s playing WoW along with the rest of us “unwashed masses”. I’m constantly amazed at just who plays WoW, since I’m always running into this type of “cameo” mentions in my travels across the Internet.

BTW, if any of you readers out there are interested, my guild, KanakAttack, is on the Suramar server and always looking for new members . 

 

1/16/2006 5:13:47 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  general

Fake News

“Man who shot Pope about to be released”

This is the headline for a story on CNN, but its also playing in all the media outlets. What’s wrong with this?

Well, as it turns out, the man, Mehmet Ali Agca, is not being freed from prison for shooting the Pope. He served 20 years for that in Italy, and was released to Turkey (to serve a sentence for a different crime) 4 1/2 years ago.

The only thing that seems to make this “news” is the headline itself. What does it mean when the media “creates” news by proper working of the headline?

 

1/12/2006 9:20:28 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | world affairs

Unaware

Yesterday, Chris Sells posted a comment regarding a comic Rory put together about Chris and various other ‘Softie luminaries. Somehow, Chris has the mistaken idea that he’s not a marketing geek. sigh. Where to begin?

By the way, Chris’ blog/RSS includes no permalinks. It makes referencing his comments difficult. Just what I’d expect from a marketing geek.

1/11/2006 9:33:35 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

A Revelation

I saw today that the House of Representatives are considering a total ban on privately funded trips. This brought to mind the case of Mike Espy, back in the ‘90s. Mr. Espy was the Secretary of Agriculture when he was charged by an independent counsel, Donald Smaltz, of illegally taking gifts. At the time, I assumed that Mr. Espy had run afoul of the difference between the rules for Congressmen (he had previously been a member of the House of Representatives) and Cabinet Members.

As it turns out, however, Mr. Espy was acquitted of all charges in 1998!

This led me to a few thoughts:

1. Why didn’t I know this? The press was all over Mr. Espy when he was indicted on these charges, but I don’t remember anything when he was acquitted (to their credit, I discovered this via a Washington Post article, which they did publish, on the front page!).

2. The whole “independent counsel” thing was such a travesty. The concept came out of the Watergate scandal, when President Nixon attempted to exert undue influence over the Justice Department’s investigation of the Watergate affair and cover-up. However, the result has been just the opposite, with these investigators trying every sleazy trick in the book to “get” government officials. Frankly, I think these guys watch too much TV, and think they should be operating similarly to what they’re seeing in the cop shows.

3. (a corollary to #2) What if what we’re seeing here is how these guys conduct investigations of the average citizen? This is both ridiculous and scary. I’d say that this is a scandal waiting to happen.

1/11/2006 9:05:23 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

To 'DasBlog' or not to 'DasBlog'

Lately, I’ve been considering switching from dasBlog to Community Server…

I’d originally looked at Community Server when thinking about setting up my blog, but the blog support didn’t seem to be there back then.

Now, lots of folks are using it for blogging, and I’ve been toying with the idea of making my site available to friends and family for their own blogs. Also, Community Server has built-in forum functionality, which I’d like to have.

On the other hand, I’ve been pretty satisfied with dasBlog.

What to do… What to do…

 

1/10/2006 3:07:57 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Why I used their full names

So, why did I use Katy and Matt’s full names when addressing them in the previous post? After all, it sounded a little forced. Well, I recently did a Google of my name, and what should I see, but blog entries!

So, in the off chance that Katy, Matt, or one of their “people” should Google their names for comments, I figured it was worth it to include their full names. Just in case…

Did you guys get this one too? Katy Couric? Matt Lauer?

1/10/2006 3:03:20 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

More on Knowledge

I’ve been thinking about my previous posts on News vs. Knowledge, etc.

Just what is the “proper response” to this state of affairs? Should we point out when inaccuracies are published? And, if we do this, aren’t we just giving more attention to the inaccuracy?

Yesterday, Michael Barone commented on James Risen’s interview on the Today show… BTW, Risen is the New York Times reporter who co-authored the paper’s story about NSA surveillance of Americans. Risen seems to believe that Democracy is best served when decisions are left up to the civil service, and not up to elected & appointed officials, such as the Vice President or Secretary of State.

Now, in my mind, this is patent nonsense. But, 1: The Today show published these thoughts via an interview. 2: if these thoughts are not refuted, they become part of the public “conventional wisdom”. 3: if we do refute them, then we lend credence to the words, treating the idea as (in some way) valid.

I suppose, we could simply say that James Risen’s views of Democracy are ridiculous in the extreme, and probably self-serving, since he’s really just hawking a book he wrote and didn’t consider the topic newsworthy before the book was published.

In short, the man’s a hack, and Today should be ashamed of themselves for giving him a forum. Did you hear that, Katy Couric? Matt Lauer? Ashamed.

1/10/2006 3:00:22 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  politics | general

An Expected Disappointment

Originally, I’d planned on completely skipping The Wedding Crashers. I’d gotten my fill of Vince Vaughn’s character (and he always plays the same one), so I didn’t see any reason to see the movie. Then The Movie Blog listed it as one of the 10 best movies of 2005. They said that it was really funny.

I figured, “why not?” I could use some laughs.

The first half of the movie isn’t bad, and there are some very funny scenes in it. That being said, the movie stinks about as much as I expected. The second half of the move is so cliche its transcendental. I could not believe just how bad the writing of the second half was. I was actually glad when it ended.

That being said, Vince Vaughn was not bad, even tolerable. And (at least) his character has some interesting twists. Owen Wilson’s character, on the other hand, was so terrible it was indeed painful.

So, fair warning: Do not see this picture! Watch The Philadelphia Story instead…

1/10/2006 9:14:30 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Variation on a Theme: Regardiing my previous post

I’ve been thinking about my previous post. Just what do we “know” anyway? Just how much of our “knowledge” is based upon someone else’s idea of either what we “should” know, or even simply based on someone else’s idea of what they want to tell us?

There’s an old Chinese axiom that goes something like “the more you learn, the less you know”. I’m starting to feel that way…

1/6/2006 12:06:33 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

News vs. Knowledge

Cathy Young in the Y Files is reporting some interesting statistics from New Orleans and hurricane Katrina. This data completely contradicts the conventional wisdom on the storm.

Of course, this data is not news, since it doesn’t result in anyone being “blamed”. This is to be expected. Contemporary “news” is about real-life drama and astonishment, not about boring facts.

The unfortunate thing is that for many people, the news becomes what they “know” about the incident, so those “dramatic” stories regarding the aftermath of Katrina becomes their understanding of what “really happened”, and the so-called racism reported becomes enshrined in their personal history.

This is the real tragedy of Katrina: that most people won’t know what really happened there, because there’s no “story” for the media to tell.

1/6/2006 11:37:16 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

Windows and IE

Today, Microsoft Watch had an article titled “Should the Windows and IE Teams go their Separate Ways?”. Here’s my own 2 cents on the subject:

Frankly, I think Microsoft has way too much of its attention paid to Windows. It seems that they are using their success in other areas more and more to shore up Windows. Not only with IE, but I see the same thing with .NET (C#, at least, should be widely available, and the .NET runtime should also), Visual Studio, and Office. While I never bought into the whole “Microsoft is a Monopoly” nonsense (depending upon how you cut it, Apple is a monopoly, Intel is a monopoly, Dell is a monopoly, etc.),  Microsoft is now placing their own interests ahead of those of their consumers. Now, this may be perfectly legal and ethical, but as a Microsoft consumer, I don’t like it, and am more and more leaning to expressing that dislike by moving on. Do you hear me, Microsoft?

1/4/2006 11:07:54 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

The (next) shoe's dropped at ReplayTV

Those of you who know me well (probably, all who read this  ), know that I’m a big fan of ReplayTV (arguably, the first DVR on the market). I don’t know whether TiVo came before it, but I sure never heard of TiVo before I’d already had my first ReplayTV installed.

Water under the bridge.

Anyway, I did my regular pilgrimage to the ReplayTV site, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but no ReplayTV models!

Then, the reason slowly appeared: ReplayTV is getting out of the hardware business. They’re saying “Coming in 2006 for the PC”. They say that this will make them profitable in a big way. We’ll see. The title of this is “next shoe” instead of “other shoe”, because I don’t think this is the end. And, I’m hoping that it’s not the end of ReplayTV DVRs. Because, there’s no way I’m going back to traditional TV, and I’d really really hate to have to buy a TiVo…

 

12/22/2005 3:48:51 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

Today is (apparently) Gender Gap day

Today, both ComputerWorld’s Blogwatch and the Daily Grind (!) posted articles related to “women in computers”. Yawn. About the only thing related to this topic that doesn’t generate a yawn from me, is the seriousness attached to the topic by others.

To be fair, I should say that I’ve added the “I’m a geek. I’m Female…” blog to my RSS list.

This topic used to bug me. Why weren’t there more women in high tech? My early career was in both the education field, and then working in an office. Both of these areas are mostly female, so I’ve been used to having a lot of women around in the workplace. Once I made the switch to engineering, that changed dramatically. There had to be a reason.

Then, I read Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher (ISBN 0262632691). It was eye opening. According to this book, women don’t come into the field because 1) they don’t like the people (men) in the field, because they’re (the men are) too geeky (hard to argue with that point) and 2) women don’t deal positively with the kind of pressure created in the field (men tend to be optimistic toward the pressure, thinking they can conquer it. Women tend to be pessimistic toward the pressure, thinking their struggle is a direct reflection of their inability). I think its important to note that the authors are positive about getting women into computing. Their ultimate solution is to make the field more attractive/conducive to women. Sigh.

Look, it bugs me greatly that there are not more women in my field. For obvious reasons, this bugs me even more than the lack of hispanics and african-americans in the field (though there’s a shortage there too, I don’t know why). And there are indeed a lot of jerks in the field (hey, I’ve had to work with them too. I don’t much like it either). But there isn’t any discrimination going on (except, apparently, among women), so lets get on with our lives!

Whew! Okay, enough of this.

 

12/19/2005 12:03:35 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Being American

Today, Morgan Freeman was quoted in a Yahoo News article as calling Black History Month “ridiculous”. Amen.

I’ve thought quite a bit about the issue over the past months. Like (almost) all Americans, I’m a descendant of immigrants. And, like the vast majority of immigrant descendants in the US, I’m NOT descended from the Pilgrims. They were a bunch of intolerant Protestants from England. My ancestors were a bunch of Portuguese from various Portuguese colonies in the Atlantic and Chinese from China. And yet, every November I, along with all those other descendants of non-Pilgrim immigrants, celebrate Thanksgiving. Why is this? Certainly, my heritage doesn’t include that first Thanksgiving the Pilgrims and their Indian (okay, Native American) friends celebrated. Or does it?

While my Portuguese and Chinese heritages don’t include that first Thanksgiving, my American heritage does. Yes, that’s right. For those of us who are citizens (and possibly some of us who aren’t), our heritage also includes America. Now, I happen to be very proud of my American heritage (also my Portuguese and Chinese heritages, but that’s another story). So, celebrations of holidays like Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Independence Day give me an opportunity to celebrate my American heritage.

So, what does this have to do with Black History Month?

Here’s the thing: I’m not descended from any African American slaves (or any other American slaves for that matter, there were others). This doesn’t mean that I don’t have anything in common with those slaves. Slavery was a fundamental part of the founding of America. We ended up fighting a war among ourselves over it (don’t be fooled by revisionist talk; if there had been no slavery, there wouldn’t have been a “wedge issue” to divide the states at the time of the civil war).

The way I see it, as all Americans are descended in spirit from that small group of Pilgrims celebrating thanks in Plymouth colony, all Americans are descended from those slaves that were imported to America from Africa, and did so much to make this country what it is today.

So, since there’s no Pilgrim History Month, there should be no Black History Month. As Morgan Freeman says, its all just American History, and we should be teaching it that way. They don’t teach the history of the Congo or Botswana in Black History Month, they teach the lives of great Americans, like Frederick Douglass and George Washington Carver (to name just a couple of great Americans). We shouldn’t be thinking of it as “those people’s history”, its all of our history too.

So, for those of you who may remember my question of “Why is Rosa Parks like Priscilla Alden?”, they were both great Americans. And I’m proud to be included with both of them (even if I have no idea what Priscilla Alden really did for us all).

12/15/2005 2:54:23 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Math problems

Something has to be wrong with my information or calculations.

I’ve been doing some investigation, and, in 2004, the national murder rate in the U.S. was 5.5 per 100,000 people.

According to the CIA, the US population is 295,734,134.

This means that in 2004, approximately 16,000 people were murdered. Is this right? What am I doing wrong? This can’t be right. That’s sixteen thousand people murdered last year.

I can’t believe that this is correct…

12/14/2005 12:02:46 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics | world affairs

Government Workers and Religious Holidays

Here’s an interesting mental exercise:

Should government agencies be prevented from taking Sunday off because its a religious holiday?

If you doubt that Sunday is a “holiday”, then check your “red-letter” calendar. While Saturdays are marked in black, traditionally all Sundays are marked in the red, “holiday” color.

Also, is a national holiday of Christmas a violation of church and state separation?

 

12/8/2005 9:41:17 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

What does it mean to be "Tolerant"?

Michael Barone published an interesting entry on the limits of tolerance. I think that it raises an interesting question: Does tolerance require the tolerating intolerance?

For me, it brings to mind the “fact” (at least I think its a fact) that America’s religious freedom was born out of religious intolerance. Part of the “free expression of religion” that folks like the Pilgrims and Puritans came to America for was to limit free expression within their own group (or even locality).

There seems to be a fine line here.

12/6/2005 9:11:56 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  world affairs | politics | general

IT Motivation

I was reading the tail column in the November 21 edition of InfoWorld, “Off the Record (Anonymous Tales from the Front Lines)”.  The title of the article is “When Your Clients Hate IT”. The author relates a story of having to deal with users who’ve been burned by a previous BPA (Business Process Analyst). At the end of the article he says “I sometimes wonder why people, especially the customer-facing ones, in the IT profession forget that they belong to a service organization”. While I understand, and empathize, with his feelings, he doesn’t seem to understand the realities of the IT world. Having worked for five years in IT, I learned quite a bit about that particular viewpoint.

There are three typical attitudes that you’ll see among IT workers:

1. “This is just a job”: These folks come to work and do their job. It’s a paycheck to them, and they have not real personal investment beyond that. They’re the IT equivalent of the civil servant. These folks don’t seem to realize that this attitude is not conducive to a long career in IT. And, in fact, they’re usually the first to go in a downturn. On the bright side, they’re extremely rare in the IT industry. As a whole, there’s just too much stress and overwork to make this type of job attractive to the paycheck crowd.

2. “I’m here for the users”: These folks get their “reward” from empowering and supporting the line workers. Judging from the tone of the article I read, this is the type of IT worker who wrote it. And, this was the type of IT worker I was for those five years. As I learned the hard way, career advancement for these types is also limited. This is where the “reality” of IT enters the picture, and the third type of IT worker.

3. “I’m here to get ahead”: These folks know which side of the bread is buttered. They know the primary fact of life for IT, and act accordingly. Which leads to this important fact: IT gets its rewards from the executives, and its the executives that a successful IT worker must keep happy. Often, this means ignoring the “needs” of the line worker while satisfying the needs of an executive or executives. This is the dirty, little secret of IT: success is not connected to satisfying line workers (at least not directly) or even to business success of the company, it’s all tied to keeping VP’s, Presidents, and various “Chief” officers happy. When they’re happy, IT is rewarded. If they’re not happy, then IT feels the brunt. The sad fact is that because IT is seen as an “internal” “service” department, their productivity is rarely connected to the success/failure of line workers or the company as a whole.

12/2/2005 10:12:43 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

New Media

I don’t (as yet) have a “movie” category, so this gets cross filed as both “TV” and “General”.

In checking the news today, two thoughts concerning the current state of the Entertainment industry popped into my head:

1. The movie industry is overdue for a paradigm shift. Theaters are not cutting it anymore. Personally, I’m going to about 1 movie a year now. I’d much rather be sitting in my living room, complete with surround sound and a wide screen TV, watching a DVD than schlepping to the movie theater just to “share the experience” with a bunch of strangers. And, frankly, the picture quality at the theater is not as good as what I have at home. It’s time for the theaters, and the movie industry as a whole, to do something about this. So, either they give up on theaters (not an impossibility, where are all the drive-ins now?), or they remake them into some kind of super living room. Frankly, if they don’t figure out something soon, the movie going public with figure it out for them.

2. Then, there’s TV. According to New York Metro, this summer Universal did an interesting thing: they released a movie based upon a TV series that flopped. Of course, I’m talking about Serenity, the movie version of the Firefly series that Fox cancelled (they also cancelled Family Guy. sounds like a pattern forming). The article (much later, but read the whole thing anyway) goes on to speculate that if Joss Whedon were to do a new season of Firefly, direct to DVD, he could end up with $40 million to play with, without a network or advertisers, or even a schedule time slot. How sweet would that be? TV’s due for a major shakeup. The big thing’s not that you can download Lost or Desperate Housewives to a little hand-held device, but that this technology lets you watch the show whenever you want! It’s only a matter of time (and not a lot of that) before people are watching TV shows when they want, where they want with (possibly) little or no commercial interruption, or commercials will be targeted specifically to them (a la Google), so folks will actually choose to watch them. I can’t wait…

 

11/30/2005 5:08:28 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | TV

Unintended Consequences

According to FuturePundit, through Instapundit, the demand for biofuels is destroying rain forests. As Glenn Reynolds said, “oops”.  Apparently, the worldwide market for “green energy” (mainly from Europe) is driving the need for vegetable oils, especially palm and soybean oil. And, this is being met by countries in the tropical climates cutting down their rain forests for farmland.

On the other hand, I keep thinking of the beginning of the last century, when the advent of the automobile was looked upon as a pollution reducer. Imagine a city the size of Manhattan with a horse for every car…

I also remembering someone calling hydrogen burning “non-polluting” because it “just” produced water vapor. Of course, water vapor is a greenhouse gas…

 

11/23/2005 4:02:29 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | world affairs

My suspicions are confirmed!
Computerworld just published an article that has confirmed what I’ve suspected for a long time: Linus growth is affecting the Unix community a lot more than its affecting the Windows community.
11/23/2005 3:08:06 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

Education and Intolerance

Today on Sean Hannity, Sean was interviewing Rebecca Beach, a college student who was verbally attacked (via e-mail) by a professor. Of course, this was a case where a left-wing professor clashed with a right-wing student (why else would Sean be interviewing the student). However, this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this. My eldest niece, who recently graduated from a state college, had similar experiences, where her professor presented a position that she completely disagreed with. And, she felt that by commenting on this, she would be placing her grade in jeopardy.

When did this happen? When I was in school, the educational system was a haven for right-wing thought, and (surprise, surprise) the “powers that were” did not hesitate to cut off any open discussion on the topics of the day. The professors of today also grew up in this period, and you’d think they would have learned something about the necessity of fostering a free expression of ideas. Instead, we have a current educational system that is at least as closed minded as that of the previous generation.

Schools, especially colleges, should be places where discussions happen, not indoctrination. We need to foster the development of educators who put education and discussion first, not their own particular beliefs.

11/23/2005 2:05:22 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Nerd TV

Bob Cringely (the real one, not the InfoWorld wannabe) finally has had someone on his new program that’s interesting.

As background, Bob recently (okay a couple of months ago) started a Pod Cast-friendly web “program” called NerdTV. It was a good idea (Bob interviews movers and shakers of the computer industry) that (until now) didn’t work out so well for him. It sounds good to say that you’re interviewing the likes of Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Joy, Dave Winer, or Tim O’Reilly. However, none of these interviews (and I listened to all of them) seemed to result in anything interesting to hear. Now, your mileage may vary. I’ve been tooling around long enough in computer-dom that none of these names were unfamiliar to me, and I suspect that Bob may have dwelled a little too long on computer history rather than anything contemporary.

However, his interview of Anina, a mobile web maven, and (gasp!) international model, was brilliant. Anina brings an interesting perspective to software development, and the mobile web in general: She’s a hobbyist, who got into web technology programming because no one was providing what she needed to stay in touch. Since her initial foray, she’s become a leader in the industry, with her own highly artistic web site as well as a list of credits that would do any technologist proud.

Take some time to hear her interview, I found it extremely fascinating.

Bravo, Bob!

By the way, I was so impressed, that I've added NerdTV to the Nav list...

11/14/2005 4:36:45 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  development | general

Hopping on the Bandwagon

The latest buzz seems to be the latest buzzword / TLA: GYM.

Any guesses what it stands for? It’s pretty easy to figure out (I think)…

 

 

Google – Yahoo – Microsoft.

I guess these are the new 600 lb. gorillas in the web world. Or, as some prefer it, the companies they love to hate.

I think its interesting that Microsoft (arguably the oldest software company in operation) is still at the top of the list. It’s also interesting that Google and Yahoo have gone from darlings of the industry to (in some minds) villains. I guess having ska-doodles (that’s a lot) of money will do that for some folks.

 

11/14/2005 10:09:19 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

More Indepth "Stuff"

Alan has been saying that he’s waiting for more in-depth posts from me on the blog. I’d say that I’m doing pretty good, compared to a guy that only posts a couple of times a month. But, he has a point. I’ve had a few thoughts floating around in my head that I haven’t committed to the Net due to a lack of time to compose them well.

I’ll be making time in the near future to get them out, so stay tuned.

As a hint of what’s to come, “Riddle me this, Batman:“

Why is Rosa Parks like Priscilla Alden?

11/9/2005 4:59:39 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Hooray, Hooray!

For years, I’ve been trying to get the recipe for a sauce that was used at local drive-ins in Hawaii when I was younger. Most of those drive-ins are gone now, done away with by McDonald’s, Burger King, and their ilk.  There are now only a handful of places left in Hawaii that serve hamburgers with this sauce.

Today, I was finally rewarded: the Honolulu Star-Bulletin published their own rendition of the sauce, which is still used at the Byron’s Drive-In near the airport. They say its very close to the original in taste. I’ll try it out and see.

For any of you Oregonians who are wondering what this stuff is like, it is very similar (in taste) to Burgerville’s spread.

11/9/2005 4:54:24 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

It's been quiet, maybe TOO quiet...
So, Alan pointed out to me the other day that it’s been a while since I’ve posted here, and he missed it. Sometimes it feels like I’m shouting down a well, though I have to admit that the shouting itself can be satisfying. It feels good to know that someone is paying attention. Now, I’ve just got to come up with something to say!
10/28/2005 1:36:30 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Arrr!

Arrr! Today be Talk Like a Pirate Day! So, me maties, be sure to pay proper attention to yer speakin’!

 

Arrr!

9/19/2005 4:09:32 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

My latest book

Here’s my latest “What I’m Reading” entry: I just finished Magic Street by Orson Scott Card. It isn’t very long, but it’s quite interesting: fantasy with an African-American twist. Haven’t you wondered why all those fantasy heros were white guys? Well, this story shows what happens when its the African-American that have the fairy trouble.

It’s quite good, if a bit short. Other than the before mentioned African-American twist, it’s a pretty pedestrian story, but what a twist! I wouldn’t mind seeing this one on Sci-Fi or as a movie (are you listening, Hollywood?).

9/19/2005 3:28:00 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | books

Google Blog Search
Google does it again. They have a (beta) Blog search engine. It’s way cool. They even (blush) have my pages! What a country!
9/14/2005 10:42:38 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

We have a new acronym

We seem to have a new acronym. Everywhere I look on the Internet, I see MSM this, MSM that. It took me a while to figure it out. MSM: MainStream Media. sheesh. You’d think that the jokers pushing this would realize by now that everybody knows there’s no difference in the media; they’re all “mainstream”. Quit kidding yourselves, guys.

9/13/2005 11:01:50 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

Lights Out

So, I was sitting in my hotel room getting a bit of work done, when the electricity suddenly went off. It didn’t bother me since I’ve got battery, and its daylight. Since there’s heavy construction going on right outside my window, I figured that someone hit a power line nearby.

It wasn’t until the power came back on in an hour or so that I found out that the whole city had lost power (it made the national news!). At least, how the rest of the world defines “whole city”, since I was sitting in a hotel room in LA watching a national newscast telling the world that all of LA was without power! I guess it’s like those national weather forecasts that always show rain in the Northwest…

At least, this vindicated my not being at PDC today. all those guys were sitting in the dark.

9/12/2005 8:22:30 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | PDC 05

Free Day

Well, today was a free day for me. Microsoft (in their infinite wisdom) decided to handle pre-conference registration by handing out those colored bands that get used for conferences. To compound things, they handed out the bands first, then (in another room) handed out the bags. So, as a result, my band for today went into my pocket. Well sometime between registration and this morning when I put my pants on, the band disappeared.

So, how does Microsoft handle this? they want me to pay another $600 to attend a rather questionable session on Visual Studio Extension. I laughed, and gave myself a “free day”. Sometimes I wonder just who is running the show at Microsoft. sheesh.

9/12/2005 8:18:41 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | general | PDC 05

`

Paul Thurrott has revealed that there will be seven Windows Vista editions:

• Starter
• Home Basic
• Home Premium
• Ultimate
• Small Business
• Professional
• Enterprise

Justin French asks the question, “How would the average home user possibly choose…”.

Well, Justin. I can answer that question easily: They’ll “choose” the edition that ships with the PC they buy. The “average home user” is not going to buy an upgrade for their existing PC. Why would they? They barely use XP’s capabilities, let alone whatever they’ll get with Vista.

9/12/2005 10:03:45 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

At the PDC

It’s Sunday, and I’m at the first pre-conference PDC session. Actually, it’s lunch time and I’m sitting at a table outside of the session room. My first session is on C# 2.0. So far, just one real surprise: Thanks to Generics, foreach has gone from the iterating loop of choice to “not so great”. Because, as when templates were added to C++, it’s much faster/cheaper to just add iteration directly to your generic collection classes than deal with the inefficiencies of Enumerators. It turns out that there are still reasons to use Enumerators in C# 2.0, but it’s a whole lot less clear, and frankly, much more esoteric. Unless something changes, look to see foreach getting deprecated as a general looping mechanism in C#.

A word on what I’m doing and where I’m at: This is being brought to you via wireless access at the LA Convention Center, thanks to our host, Microsoft. They even have facilities here for the “great unwashed” that don’t have WiFi capability: wires for direct connects and even Internet Terminals for those who really travelled light.

This as been my first real opportunity to post to the blog. PDX advertises WiFi at the airport, but I couldn’t connect via my laptop. I would’ve suspected the machinations of my IT department, but the WiFi connection at my home worked like a charm. I don’t know what the problem at PDX was, especially since my Palm LifeDrive had no trouble hooking up (note to self: investigate blogging sw for the Palm). My next opportunity was my hotel room at the Radisson Midtown LA. It turns out that this is the weekend that they’re switching over from wired access (piggy backing on USC’s connection) to their own WiFi solution. So, while there’s no connection this weekend, I should have WiFi capability tomorrow (Monday) morning. We’ll see…

As a result of no Internet prior to the conference, I had to scoot here when I got up this morning, since I’d forgotten to print out my pre-conference itinerary. The good news was that my session didn’t start for 2 hours. The bad news was that I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, and there are no real breakfast facilities near the Convention Center. However, I did have 2 hours, and I saw a Holiday Inn at the outskirts of the downtown LA area, so I hoofed it over there and had a nice, if expensive (hotel prices) breakfast there before hoofing it back to the Convention Center. I still ended up back with an hour to spare .

Today’s the short day. It doesn’t look like anything after the pre-conference session, so I can just head back to my room for the evening. Tomorrow I can take my time getting to the Convention Center.

9/11/2005 12:39:10 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | general | PDC 05

Next Week
Next week, I’m off to the Microsoft PDC for some “geek time”. I’ll either have a lot to say or no time to say anything . Ideally, the conference will have WiFi, and I’ll be able to do some “live blogging”. We’ll see…
9/9/2005 4:45:50 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

What I'm Reading

A couple of weeks ago, when I had dinner with Kurt and his wife, Patricia, we got talking about books. It turns out that Patricia is a fan of science fiction. Who’d have thought! I’m always surprised by just who reads sci fi and fantasy among bibliophiles.

Anyway, this reminded me that one of the things I wanted to do in this here blog was share the books I’m reading. So, here’s the first installment.

I’m currently reading Shadowfall, by James Clemens. This is the first book by Clemens that I’ve read. Apparently, he has a few other books under his belt. It’s the start of a Fantasy series. I haven’t finished it yet (I’m at the climax), but so far, its been a good read. It has a unique take on gods and god-magic. I always enjoy a twist in that area. The story concerns a fallen “Shadowknight” who witnesses the assassination of a god and is promptly blamed for the crime. The ensuing plot twists are fairly predictable, but still, that whole god-magic thing has me hooked. Get this: the gods’ power is tied to their bodily secretions! In fact, there’s a whole economy built around these secretions.

So, for those who enjoy a good book about god wars and divine magic, I’d recommend this book.

 

9/8/2005 7:17:39 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  books | general

Some of the fog is clearing

It looks like some of the hype fog around Linux, and specifically desktop Linux, is clearing. ComputerWorld reporter Sharon Machlis recently published a series of articles on her experiences with various desktop Linux distributions, and let’s just say that she was less than complimentary.

It’s about time that there were more clear headed discussion of the Linux vs. Windows issue. Evangelizing (from both camps) is all well and good, but at some time, the guys that are supposed to be keeping us honest need to speak up. Frankly, in the past, there was way too much MS bashing and Linux rah rah-ing for my taste.

Way to go, Sharon, and whomever at ComputerWorld assigned this to you.

9/1/2005 10:44:12 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | general

Where the money is going

Last night over dessert, Kurt brought up an interesting question: Just where is all the money allocated for the war in Iraq going? This surprised me, mainly because it’s been a sore spot with me for a long while. Well, I’ve found a (partial) answer, or at least a way to get at the answer. The U.S. Central Command, who’s running the show in both Iraq and Afghanistan, publish two newsletters, a CentCom newsletter and a Coalition Bulletin, just chock full of information on what’s going on in these two theaters. Frankly, I think that the administration has done a piss-poor job of sharing this kind of information.

Those interested in keeping track of the real progress in the  mid-east can subscribe to the newsletters here.

On a more personal note, it was great having dinner with Kurt and Patricia last night. We always have some terrific conversation, something I sorely miss since moving on to a new job.

8/25/2005 9:52:56 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics | world affairs

A Chilling Thought
Here’s a chilling thought, from The Huffington Post:  Freshmen entering college this fall were born in 1987. 1987! That was almost yesterday! It gives me chills…
8/24/2005 4:49:28 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

What are they up to?
It’s official. Google Talk is up and running (in beta at least). For the life of me, I don’t know why we need yet another IM system. At least, this one is Jabber compatible (for what that’s worth). The boys at Google have previously said that they don’t get into new markets unless they had something significantly different / superior to offer. So far, I don’t see anything that meets that criterion in Google Talk.
8/24/2005 8:45:58 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

The Religion of Science

As reported in the New York Times, a student in the audience of a recent scientific conference at the City College of New York asked, “Can you be a good scientist and believe in God?”

To which, Herbert A. Hauptman, a Nobel laureate in chemistry responded with a quick and sharp “No!”.  Thankfully, his view is not one shared by all scientists.

More and more, I’ve seen a tendency for the non-religious in the US to adopt a world view where Science answers all questions and is considered “reality”. For those of us who remember our scientific method, we know that this is not the case. Science merely provides a “working model”, that helps to provide answers to questions in a mechanistic manner.

There is no basic conflict between scientific knowledge and belief in God, as many religious scientists will tell you. Now, this doesn’t mean that some religious tenets don’t conflict with current scientific knowledge (i.e. Creationism), but that’s an artifact of religious conservatism, not religious belief.

 

8/23/2005 10:01:11 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics | world affairs

RSS vs. Web Feeds

There seems to be a lot of talk lately around the name for this syndication thing that we’re all using. From what I’m hearing, various people are upset that Microsoft is thinking of using the term “Web Feeds” instead of “RSS” to refer to their syndication support.

At first, I agreed. Why play with names? Why gratuitously use a different name than the industry uses? Then, as I was reading Asa Dotzler’s comments on the issue, I got to thinking about it: RSS is a syndication protocol. Atom is a syndication protocol. These guys are different animals, even though they provide essentially the same service. And just what is this service? Well, I guess “Web Feeds” is as good a name as any.

I wonder how the Atom folks feel about this controversy. After all, I’m sure they wouldn’t like the general service to be called RSS…

 

By the way, I love the RSS button from Dave Winer's post. I just might change my xml icons to use this instead .

8/16/2005 9:37:02 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development | general

Well, that was painless

I just upgraded to the Gold version of Das Blog 1.8 . The process was quite painless. I did get a new copy of Beyond Compare to take care of the site config comparisons. Mostly, it was a matter of copying my backed up files back into the uploaded new software.

My thanks to Scott and Omar for a great job!

 

8/12/2005 9:45:07 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Marriage with a Twist

Instapundit reports that two men in Toronto are planning to get married. The twist in this case is that the men are heterosexual. Apparently, they just want the tax benefits of being married. This could be the beginning of the other shoe falling in the whole “gay marriage” debate: if (supposedly) traditional restrictions on marriage are outmoded and gay folk are allowed to marry, then what about all of the other marriage restrictions? What about brothers and sisters? What about polygamy?

For the record (just in case you’re getting the wrong idea here), I’m in favor of gay marriage. I think building strong family ties is good for society, and our government should be supporting it. I just wonder if society (especially those whose support of gay marriage is a knee jerk response to certain right wing groups) is ready for the ramifications.

8/12/2005 11:35:08 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics | world affairs

What is Weblogs.com?

Eric's asked what is Weblogs.com. Weblogs.com (and blo.gs) are blog indexes. Now that I"ve turned on the ping feature of Das Blog for those sites, when I post an entry here, it'll be cross-posted there, as a kind of general publishing of my entry.

8/9/2005 5:36:29 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

I'm taking the training wheels off
I’ve had the Weblogs.com publishing feature of Das Blog turned off since I started this shindig, because I wanted a little “privacy” while I got back into the swing of blogging. Now, I’m thinking that its time to take off the training wheels and “join” the world at large. Wish me luck…
8/9/2005 11:39:30 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

A Liberal "Education"

I searched the web for a definition of “Liberal” and “Liberalism”, and boy did I get an education! It seems that what we think of as “Liberal” today is very different from both the accepted definition and what the rest of the world thinks of as “Liberal”.

Liberalism in the U.S. seems to be more of a blend of liberalism and social democracy, while what the rest of the world thinks of as “Liberalism” is more like American Libertarianism.

On top of this difference, there’s the fact that the sites that profess to advocate Liberalism have rather “generous” definitions. In stead of simply defining what “Liberalism” means, they include issues that others use as criticisms of “Liberalism”. For instance, they state that Liberalism is “pro family”. There is absolutely nothing that I know of in current Liberal thought that addresses the family in any way. This isn’t to say that Liberalism is “anti-family” (no matter what those “other guys” say), just that Liberalism addresses other concerns.

So, what does this mean, in terms of my inquiry? I guess this means that instead of simply taking an “accepted” definition of “Liberalism”, I’m going to have to craft my own. Work, work, work…

8/8/2005 12:46:15 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

What does "Liberal" mean?

I came to the conclusion a while back that there are no Liberals. Yes, the Republicans throw that word around, but it’s just demagoguing. All they mean by it is “my opponent”.  In today’s politics, it isn’t Liberals vs. Conservatives; it’s something else. It’s not even a “big government” vs. “small government”. Our current (Republican) President and the (Republican) Congressional Leadership have proposed and approved the largest federal budgets in history.

But, enough about “the way things are”.

My question for today, is just what is Liberalism? What does it take to make a Liberal? What philosophical and civic beliefs define a person to be Liberal?

I have no answer. But I’m thinking about it…

8/7/2005 5:11:06 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

I just had lunch...
I just had lunch with Alan, Eric, and Cyrelle from the old office. Not only was it great sitting down with old friends for lunch, but we had a long talk about software development and specifically agile development. It felt great being able to discuss and share that. I don’t get to do enough of that these days…
8/5/2005 2:09:33 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Low Rent Blogging

You know, even though I did manage to get a site up that could support Das Blog, I keep coming back to the world needing a low rent blogging environment. Something that will work with all those no frills web sites out there, like what a person gets with their ISP account. That would mean at the lowest end, something that just spit out HTML, where all the content management was done locally.

CityDesk does this, but its more of a general purpose “content management system” and really doesn’t work well as a blogging tool (sorry Joel. I did try it out, but gave up in the end). On the other hand, if CityDesk supported .NET scripting, like this or this, I think it could really take off as a web tool, but that’s another topic.

8/3/2005 4:29:12 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Well, what do you know?
What do you know? Newzcrawler posted that entry (3 times!) even with the error message. How friendly of it . I thought about deleting them, but let’s just leave them there for the whole world to see…
8/2/2005 5:10:48 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Hmph
Well, I found a way to get Newzcrawler’s blog interface to let me include a title in my post, only to run into some totally cryptic error message seemingly related to changing an entry outside of Newzcrawler. Now, that’s just ridiculous. BlogJet’s looking better and better. Now, if BlogJet would just add a Browse button to their link dialog…
8/2/2005 5:08:39 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

RTFM, RTFF?
I checked out the Newzcrawler forum, and found an entry talking about using a different API for the Blog interface. I switched to MoveableType, and voila! Titles! I don't know why Newzcrawler doesn't support titles via the Blogger API when BlogJet does. Oh well. I think BlogJet still has this interface beat (gotta love those smileys!).  So, now I want Newzcrawler to support pluggable Blog tools. Apparently, some of the other aggregators do.
8/2/2005 5:04:05 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

RTFM, RTFF?
I checked out the Newzcrawler forum, and found an entry talking about using a different API for the Blog interface. I switched to MoveableType, and voila! Titles! I don't know why Newzcrawler doesn't support titles via the Blogger API when BlogJet does. Oh well. I think BlogJet still has this interface beat (gotta love those smileys!).  So, now I want Newzcrawler to support pluggable Blog tools. Apparently, some of the other aggregators do.
8/2/2005 5:03:55 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

RTFM, RTFF?
I checked out the Newzcrawler forum, and found an entry talking about using a different API for the Blog interface. I switched to MoveableType, and voila! Titles! I don't know why Newzcrawler doesn't support titles via the Blogger API when BlogJet does. Oh well. I think BlogJet still has this interface beat (gotta love those smileys!).  So, now I want Newzcrawler to support pluggable Blog tools. Apparently, some of the other aggregators do.
8/2/2005 5:03:44 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Thanks, Alan

Thanks to Alan, I’ve moved Kurt’s and Eric’s sites to the blogroll. I’m intrigued: both Blogspot and Live Journal hide their syndication feeds. I assume its intentional; I wonder why they do it.  While my aggregator, Newzcrawler didn’t find them, SharpReader had no problem finding them. So, if their intent is to make it difficult for people to find the feeds, they’re failing.  But, then again, I shouldn’t complain because now I have them

8/2/2005 4:42:09 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

This is what I mean!

So Kurt was surprised that he didn’t have to register to post comments here. Blogger requires you to have an account with them before you can post. I mean, come on!

Okay, okay. So, it could be nice to be able to filter out the “riff raff” from the site and reduce flames. And, for the casual user, it would be nice to have the “host” do the heavy lifting for you. But then, Blogger doesn’t do any filtering.

So, yes, as things stand now, there’s no registration necessary to either see an article or post a comment. Maybe in the future. I’ll see about posting something on the Das Blog forum…

8/2/2005 2:27:52 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

hey hey hey!

We have lift-off! That fixed it, by golly. Can’t wait until this gets released. Using betas always makes my teeth hurt

And they need more smileys. I miss the Yahoo IM smileys and the MSN Messenger smileys…

8/2/2005 2:17:24 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Okay, this is another test
This version is supposed to fix a date/time bug working with TextPad. Let’s see if it works for Das Blog as well…
8/2/2005 2:15:05 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

It's here!

The grill just arrived! It was a little touch and go getting it to my deck. For those who haven't been to my place, the deck's off the ground enough that getting anything on it from the back is more trouble than its worth. So, like so many British homes' backyards, the only way to get anything on the deck is to bring it in the front door.

It barely made it through the front door, and there was no way it was going to get past the sliding door, because of the pellet hopper in the front. Luckily, the grill is actually narrower than it is deep, so they just rotated it, and it (barely) slid out to the deck.

Then, the latest complication: they forgot the drip bucket at the store. So, I could either drive out to Tigard to pick it up, or they'd drop it off later in the week (sheesh). I really wasn't planning on trying the grill out until Saturday, so I told them to just drop it off.  Besides, I have to "season" the grill, which means running it for 45 minutes at high. I'll do that later in the week.

8/2/2005 9:51:26 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Pickin' and Grinnin'

Here I am, sitting at home, waiting for the delivery guy. I messed up. I'm expecting my new Traeger grill   to arrive today. They said "between 8:00 and 12:00. So, of course, this morning, I calmly got dressed and went to work! I finally remembered at 8:30. Hopefully, I wasn't the first on their list.

Of course, when I got home, I had a message on my answering machine (left at 7:40) that they were on their way. sigh.

8/2/2005 9:08:53 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

There's a date/time problem
There seems to be a date/time problem with BlogJet. Notice the time of this posting? It’s actually 2:07 pm by my computer’s clock. What gives??
8/2/2005 7:08:04 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Here we go again!

Once again, I'm heading down the blogger trail. It seems like everybody is blogging these days, not like the last time (3 years ago)...

Both Kurt and Eric already have blogs up, and there's even several internal blogs at work (no, you can't see those. I said internal). And Bob's been bugging me about getting my blog up to date. He's discovered RSS, and wants sites to subscribe to.

So, here it is; the start of a new, improved blog. BTW, I'm using Das Blog for this. I've got to admit, it seems a whole lot better than the state of blogging systems 3 years ago. The stone age quality back then was what cooled my enthusiasm the last time.  This time, I'm considering investing in BlogJet. That's what I really want, a desktop blogging tool that makes all this typing and linking easier.

8/1/2005 7:47:17 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general