Courting Alex...

It’s that time, the Spring TV season is starting, and one of the new shows is Courting Alex, with Jenna Elfman and Josh Randall. The only review I read for the show said that it was so-so; I wasn’t hoping for a lot.

Turns out, the show is pretty good. I’d say that it has the potential to be the best show in CBS’s Monday lineup, better than Two and a Half Men.

 

 

1/24/2006 8:30:27 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  TV

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

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