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

The other (next?) shoe on warrantless wiretaps

Instapundit has an interesting reference related to Al Gore’s recent speech and history. It points to an interesting article at Gateway Pundit.

Apparently, George W. Bush isn’t the first president in recent history to use warrantless wiretaps. The Clinton administration is on the record as, not only using wiretaps for “agents of foreign governments”, but also expanding its use to warrantless searches in certain housing projects.

I wonder if the network media will (ever) report this…

And, I’m surprised that Republican Senators haven’t mentioned this.

1/17/2006 10:39:22 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  politics

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

My first reaction to ASP.NET 2.0

ASP.NET 2.0 sucks rocks.

Okay, I said it.

Recently, my study group decided to take a look at ASP.NET 2.0.  We’ve been exposed over the past couple of years (yes, years) to various Microsoft ASP.NET marketing hype, so we knew what the feature set was.  We decided to get Scott Hanselman’s book and use it as the basis of our study group.

Big mistake.

I’m not going to say that I hate Scott’s book. Though, I did loan it out to one of my study group members, with no expectation that it will be returned. And, I did order O’Reilly’s ASP.NET in a Nutshell 3rd printing, that covers ASP.NET 2.0. I’m thinking that maybe Scott’s book is good as a reference for ASP.NET. I don’t know right now.

Because, ASP.NET 2.0 is so darn complex that it’s going to be a while before I can do anything useful in it and am able to satisfactorily review any of the resources out there for it.

On the other hand, I pulled up the O’Reilly book via my Safari account (yay, O’Reilly) and we could quickly get an ASP.NET site going with a Master Page. It still required futzing around on our part, but (again) Scott’s book didn’t help here at all. The error message from ASP.NET didn’t help either. Once we figured out (on our own, though based on the O’Reilly illustrations) what we were doing wrong, we did eventually get the site up and running.

But it was not in any way “intuitive”.

Sigh. Just when are we going to see some easy way to set up web applications?

 

1/13/2006 2:42:33 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  development

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

Judge Alito

I spent much of last night listening to Judge Alito’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee. A few things come to mind:

1. He’s not as smart as John Roberts. Roberts’ body of knowledge was amazing. While Judge Alito isn’t in the same category as Chief Justice Roberts, he has a solid understanding of the law.

2. He’s eminently qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice. Judge Alito shows the right mix of judicial temperament and intelligence.

3. For what its worth, the man is very conservative. He’s no Scalia, who’s an idealogue, but he is darn conservative. I was entertained by watching him put together answers that would be neutral and not inflame his detractors. He did a creditable job.

Good luck, Sam. I’m looking forward to seeing you on the Supreme Court.

1/12/2006 8:28:58 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  politics

A nice parable

The Agile Management blog has a nice parable on requirements called “The Defective Paper Towel”.

It really gets to the point. Much of what was said about requirements in the ‘90s and before was kind of “ivory tower”, and really didn’t reflect the actual state of affairs concerning requirements.

It’s an “agile” fact of life: Requirements change. Accept it.

It’s all about understanding what the customer really wants, sort of the “meta-requirement”; and, in many cases, the customer doesn’t even know this coming into a project.

1/11/2006 10:22:12 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  development

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

Testing and Interfaces

Today, both Martin Fowler and Ian Griffiths wrote about Implicit Interfaces and their implications in testing.

Essentially, both Java and C# borrow a “feature” of C++, that each class implicitly has a defined interface matching its implementation (actually, in C++ each class has 3 interfaces: public, protected, and private).

Martin’s point (sort of) and Ian’s addendum are that this implicit interface can be difficult to test, and using explicit interfaces can help this issue by making “mocking” easier. Ian goes on to make a good point that what we really need is some “automatic” way to split the interface from the class.

I’d like to add one other point:

Among other things, I use unit testing to evaluate the design of my classes, and if I run into difficulty testing them, I infer that means that there is a problem with the design of the class. This philosophy has helped me out numerous times. I’ve lost track of the number of times that changes I made to a class’s interface turned out to be necessary for proper usage of the class.

So, I’d say that the difficulty that Martin would like addressed in the language is actually in the design of the class under test.

Let the flames begin

 

1/5/2006 2:17:15 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  development