Three Stories for Memorial Day

Posted on May 25, 2008

In honor of Memorial Day, three stories of heroism and sacrifice.

The first is the story of a group of my personal heroes: the Seabees.

When World War II broke out, the U.S. was faced with the daunting prospect of pushing Imperial Japan back across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. To make that possible would require an extensive network of ports, airfields, supply depots, bridges, roads, and other facilities that, simply put, did not exist.

The men who were charged with creating those facilities were the Seabees. Officially designated the Navy’s Construction Battalions (“C-Bs”, get it?), the Seabees were recruited from the building and construction trades; skill and experience were emphasized over youth, so Seabee units filled with skilled tradesmen who had built the great skyscrapers, dams and roads of New Deal America.

They spent the next four years fighting their way across Europe and the Pacific — but unlike most fighting men, the Seabees’ first mission was to build rather than to destroy. Sometimes they were called upon to do that building even while the fighting still raged around them. During the Battle of Guadalcanal, the Marines fought desperately to hold on to their one airstrip — Henderson Field — in the face of ferocious Japanese attempts to seize it or knock it out. As Japanese bombs fell, the Seabees’ job was to patch the bomb holes in the airstrip so that the Marine fighters of the Cactus Air Force could take off and defend the island. They pulled it off; Henderson survived and became the linchpin of the Allied victory in Guadalcanal.

At other times, Seabees took a more direct role in the fighting:

It was during the landing on Treasury Island in the Solomons, on 28 November 1943, that Fireman 1st Class Aurelio Tassone, USNR, of the 87th Naval Construction Battalion created that legendary figure of the Seabee astride his bulldozer rolling over enemy positions. Tassone was driving his bulldozer ashore during the landing when Lieutenant Charles E. Turnbull, CEC, USNR, told him a Japanese pillbox was holding up the advance from the beach. Tassone drove his dozer toward the pillbox, using the blade as a shield, while Lieutenant Turnbull provided covering fire with his carbine. Under continuous heavy fire, Tassone crushed the pillbox with the dozer blade, killing all 12 of its occupants. For this act Tassone was awarded the Silver Star.

Seabees fought with distinction in the European Theater as well; for example, among the first men to wade into the hell of the Normandy beaches were Seabees charged with clearing a way through the Germans’ beach obstructions so the rest of the landing force could make it through.

It takes a special kind of courage to face an armed enemy when you can’t carry a weapon and shoot back. For the Seabees, though, this kind of courage was an everyday thing. By war’s end, the Pacific alone saw more than 2,000 Seabees awarded the Purple Heart for being injured by enemy fire.

The Seabees earned a reputation for coolness in the face of incredible adversity. Their unofficial motto was “Can Do” — a testament to the way they took on any and all challenges that came their way. Another common Seabee saying was that “the difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a bit longer.”

Today, just outside the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, the Seabees Memorial (pictured above) stands in remembrance of their valor. And also today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Seabees are still hard at work.

Speaking of Arlington Cemetery, the second story involves how that facility — the place where America’s best and bravest find their eternal rest — came to be.

Before the Civil War, there was no Arlington Cemetery. Instead, there was Arlington House — a mansion that served as the residence for one of Virginia’s most prominent families. And as civil war loomed, the head of that family was generally considered to be the finest fighting man in the United States — Colonel Robert E. Lee.

Lee had led a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and was widely considered to be on the fast track to eventually become the Army’s commanding general. The outbreak of civil war, however, put Lee in a terrible position; he considered himself a loyal citizen of the United States, but his home state, Virginia, had chosen to leave the Union and join the fledgling Southern Confederacy. As the rebellion spread, an offer was made by the Federal government to put Lee in charge of all U.S. armies; but Lee felt he could not take up arms against his home state, so he resigned his commission and went to offer his services to Confederate Virginia. As Lee left Arlington House, Federal troops swept in and occupied the property to prevent it from being used to lob shells into Washington.

Jump ahead now three years, from 1861 to 1864. The war that everyone had thought would be quick and bloodless had descended into a nightmarish slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides had lost their lives. The flow of casualties from the battlefields so overwhelmed the Union that all the national cemeteries had been filled. The government began to look for new sites that could be commandeered and turned into cemeteries to ensure that the honored dead could be laid to rest.

One man who was charged with finding these sites was the Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army, a widely respected military engineer named Montgomery Meigs. Meigs had been born in Georgia, but unlike Lee, he had chosen to stay loyal to the United States; by choosing rebellion, Meigs felt, Lee had dishonored himself and his family.

When the request came in to identify new burial grounds for Union dead, then, Meigs had a suggestion readily at hand. The Union had seized Lee’s picturesque mansion, with its hundreds of acres of manicured grounds. Let it then punish Lee’s treason by burying its dead right on his property — turning his ancestral home into a graveyard, and making it unfit for Lee and his family to ever occupy again.

The proposal was approved, and by August 1864, Union dead were being buried in Mrs. Lee’s rose garden. By the end of the war, nearly 20,000 Union soldiers had been laid to rest there.

Meigs’ plan played out just as he’d intended; Lee never returned to Arlington House again. Since the home had been his family seat for more than sixty years, Lee felt its loss keenly. However, Meigs’ success at denying Lee a return to his home did not come without a price for himself as well; in October 1864, Meigs’ son, who was also serving in the Union Army, was killed in battle in Virginia. Perhaps fittingly, Meigs’ son became one of those 20,000 dead soldiers laid to rest in the garden of the Confederacy’s greatest champion.

The last story is a story of heroism from Iraq, on December 4, 2006, when a young soldier from Pennsylvania, Specialist Ross A. McGinnis, was faced with a terrible choice:

On December 4th, 2006, McGinnis was on patrol with a convoy, manning the .50-caliber machine gun on his [Humvee]. During a surprise attack on a narrow side street, a fragmentation grenade was thrown into the vehicle. According to the official report, McGinnis yelled “Grenade” over the intercom and tried to deflect it, but it made it inside the vehicle.

Spc. McGinnis found himself in a hero’s moment. Seated in the turret atop the vehicle, he could have jumped free before the blast. Instead, he pressed his back over the grenade to shield his fellow soldiers. When the grenade detonated, his body absorbed the lethal blast, saving the lives of every other man in the vehicle.

Sergeant First Class Cedric Thomas was in the HMMWV that day. “We didn’t have a chance to get out,” he said. “The doors were too heavy and some were combat locked. We couldn’t get out.” McGinnis’ warning came through the intercom, followed by the sound of his breathing into the open mic. Thomas recounted seeing McGinnis stand up, sit down, and then lean back into position over the grenade.

On May 24, it was announced that for his sacrifice, Specialist McGinnis would receive the nation’s highest military decoration: the Medal of Honor. He is only the fourth soldier to receive this decoration for bravery under fire in Iraq.

I include his story as a reminder on this Memorial Day that heroes and sacrifice are not just found in history books.

Some Free Advice

Posted on May 16, 2008

If you’re going on one of the cable-news yack shows armed with a set of talking points (like “Appeasement!”), be sure you know what the talking points actually mean:

Otherwise you kind of look like an ignorant fool. You know?

Inventing Situations

Posted on May 13, 2008

Could there be any better anthem for the age of YouTube and the “cognitive surplus” than the Talking Heads’ “Found a Job”, from their 1978 album More Songs About Buildings and Food?

“Damn that television … what a bad picture!”
“Don’t get upset, it’s not a major disaster.”
“There’s nothing on tonight,” he said, “I don’t know what’s the matter!”
“Nothing’s ever on,” she said, “so I don’t know why you bother.”

We’ve heard this little scene, we’ve heard it many times
People fighting over little things, and wasting precious time
They might be better off, I think, the way it seems to me
Making up their own shows, which might be better than T.V.

(CHORUS)

Judy’s in the bedroom, inventing situations
Bob is on the street today, scouting out locations
They’ve enlisted all their family
They’ve enlisted all their friends
It helped save their relationship
And made it work again

Their show gets real high ratings
They think they have a hit
There might even be a spinoff, but they’re not sure ’bout that
So think of Bob and Judy; they’re happy as can be
Inventing situations, putting them on T.V.

(CHORUS)

Judy’s in the bedroom, inventing situations
Bob is on the street today, scouting out locations
They’ve enlisted all their family
They’ve enlisted all their friends
It helped save their relationship
And made it work again …

Goddamnit, Now I Have to Buy a Blu-Ray Player

Posted on May 9, 2008

Announcement from the Criterion Collection:

We’ve got some exciting news for this fall: our first Blu-ray discs are coming! We’ve picked a little over a dozen titles from the collection for Blu-ray treatment, and we’ll begin rolling them out in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.

Here’s what’s in the pipeline:

• The Third Man
• Bottle Rocket
• Chungking Express
• The Man Who Fell to Earth
• The Last Emperor
• El Norte
• The 400 Blows
• Gimme Shelter
• The Complete Monterey Pop
• Contempt
• Walkabout
• For All Mankind
• The Wages of Fear

I’ve been wondering if Criterion was going to adopt Blu-Ray or not — they published only on Laserdisc for many years, and when DVD came out, they actually resisted publishing in that format for several years because they believed Laserdisc to be the technically superior format. (I’m sure that it didn’t hurt that they could charge $150 for Laserdisc editions, either.) I guess we can mark that question “answered”…

(Oh, and if you’ve never seen any of the movies on that list, what are you waiting for? The Third Man is one of the best movies ever, in my opinion; Gimme Shelter and Bottle Rocket are great too.)

David’s Situation

Posted on May 8, 2008

This Vanity Fair interview with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross (who have teamed up again after a decade to create a new sitcom for HBO titled David’s Situation) just reinforces my conviction that these two guys are among the funniest people working in the world today:

David: If we did a sketch show and we lived in Flint, Michigan, I’m sure that a lot of our observations would be about the dying auto industry. We live and work and breathe in Hollywood. Bob’s wife is a manager, and his son is the star of Cake.

VF: Cake? What’s that?

David: It’s a reality show.

VF: I’ve never heard of it.

David: It’s about who can eat the most cake in five years.

VF: Bob, you must be very proud of your son.

Bob: Well, he’s not winning.

The Day After

Posted on May 5, 2008

It’s hard for me to remember sometimes that there is now a whole generation of people walking around who have no memory of what it was like to live every day under the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Oh, sure, there’s still the threat that some terrorist group will get their hands on a nuke. That would be pretty bad. But during the Cold War, we all lived with the knowledge that a few bad decisions in Washington or Moscow could result in a nuclear apocalypse so horrific that it would be, for all intents and purposes, the end of the world.

What’s the difference? A terrorist nuke would destroy one city, but the rest of the world would go on. Conflict between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R would have resulted in all cities, everywhere, being destroyed — either directly by missile strike, or indirectly by fallout, nuclear winter and other assorted post-World-War-III complications.

It’s also hard to remember, through all the hagiographic haze that has settled around the memory of Ronald Reagan, that in his first term he quite deliberately set out on a course that brought America and Russia closer to the brink of this disaster then they had been in decades.

The late 1960s and 1970s had been the age of “détente” — an easing of tensions between the superpowers, who both remembered how close the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought them to annihilation. Reagan, however, viewed détente as an admission of weakness, and chose instead to deliberately ratchet up tensions between the superpowers; he embarked on an unprecedented peacetime military buildup, relaunching nuclear weapons programs like the B-1 bomber the Carter Administration had cancelled, speeding up development of others such as the “MX” missile, and launching entirely new projects like the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”). Reagan also embarked on military operations designed to bring American and Russian interests directly into confrontation, such as aiding anti-Communist rebels in Central America.

The result of all this was an increasing awareness in the world of the risk that nuclear war posed to everybody. People started to fear that Reagan’s belligerence would start the world down a slope it would not be able to climb back up again. And in 1983 — at the height of the tension — ABC spoke to these fears by airing a remarkable TV movie entitled The Day After.

The premise of The Day After was simple — it aimed to show, as clearly and realistically as possible, how a nuclear war between the superpowers would impact the lives of ordinary people in America. It was set primarily in the state of Kansas, because that state, which contained many American missile launch sites, would have come under direct attack in any nuclear war; the Russians would have hit it hoping to knock out the American missiles before they could be launched. After the missiles landed, the rest of the movie focused on isolated bands of survivors trying to pull things back together as best they could without descending into anarchy.

The movie was a landmark in television history; its special effects were unsurpassed for its time, and the audience it attracted — 100 million viewers — was the largest in U.S. television history. It sparked a national debate about the risks of nuclear confrontation and helped to push the idea of nuclear disarmament into the mainstream. That idea, and the movement that formed around it, eventually bore fruit in the form of the INF treaty — an agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to reduce the number of short-range nuclear weapons deployed on both sides. The INF treaty was the first treaty ever signed between the superpowers that resulted in an actual reduction of the number of deployed nuclear weapons.

The movie contained several unforgettably harrowing sequences. For reference, here is one of them: the initial nuclear exchange, as the residents of Kansas City and Lawrence, Kansas, realize in horror that the missiles they have lived next door to for years are being launched, with the first Soviet missiles arriving just minutes later.

(The movie depicts the first blast being detonated high in the atmosphere, causing cars to stall on the highway. This may seem unrealistic — a nuke that just stalls your car? — but it is actually a quite accurate depiction of nuclear tactics; that high-altitude burst would cause a massive electromagnetic pulse that would short out every electronic circuit within miles, causing cars to stall and airplanes to fall out of the sky. The idea was to use this EMP to make it harder for victims in the target area to flee from the other missiles following behind.)

So why am I writing about this? Because I noticed the other day that the Sci Fi Channel has been re-airing The Day After. At first I thought this was good news, because this movie is an important historical artifact, and more people should see it — especially those who do not remember what it was like to live under the nuclear Sword of Damocles.

Then I watched it. And I was disturbed to discover that Sci Fi has edited the hell out of it. Even more disappointingly, they have edited away most of the most frightening parts of the movie. In the Sci Fi version of the nuclear exchange sequence I showed you above, for example, we don’t see the people being vaporized on the streets. We don’t see the sheets of flame setting people on fire. We don’t see the farmer’s son being blinded by the nuclear flash. We see buildings collapsing, and mushroom clouds rising, but we don’t see people dying. Which is kind of contrary to the entire point of the movie.

(Note: yes, I’m aware that the YouTube clip above has the Sci Fi “bug” on it. It must be from some earlier airing, because the ones I’ve seen have not included this footage. This looks like an older version of the bug to me, so perhaps at some point years ago they were airing it unedited.)

There’s two reasons why they might have chosen to go this way. One is financial; The Day After is a long movie (three hours plus), and when it was originally aired, ABC chose not to run any commercials after the first nuclear explosion because they felt interrupting for commercials would lessen the film’s impact. That was a brave artistic decision for them to make, but Sci Fi may have felt that they could not afford to follow suit, so they had to take some movie content out to make room for commercials. That would explain why they would edit the movie down, but not why these sequences in particular would be edited out. (Indeed, since they are really the most memorable scenes in the film, you would think they would be the last to hit the cutting room floor.)

The other possibility is that Sci Fi thought that their audience’s delicate sensibilities simply couldn’t handle the graphic depictions of nuclear annihilation in the film, so they chose to leave them out. (How the sensibilities of the basic cable viewer of 2008 could be considered more sensitive than those of the network TV viewer of 25 years before, I have no idea.)

Either way, shame on Sci Fi for choosing to show a sanitized version of this important film. The Day After is not just another made-for-TV movie; it’s a part of history, and it helps us look back into the anxieties of a bygone age and understand why people feared that the end of the world might be coming nigh. Cutting out the sequences that made the film’s point most forcefully neuters it to the point where it would probably be better for them not to show it at all.

So, if you see The Day After in your Sci Fi program listing, skip it. You’re much better off renting or buying the unedited version on DVD, which has not only all the footage that aired on American TV but six extra minutes that were added for theatrical release in Europe as well.

What Do Ann Coulter and a Colonoscopy Have In Common?

Posted on April 29, 2008

Seen on the web, courtesy of Google AdWords:

What is a colonoscopy, you ask, and what could it possibly have in common with Ann Coulter?

This consists of the doctor inserting a tube into your rectum and snaking it through your lower digestive system. There is a light at the end of the tube that allows the doctor to look for abnormalities and to take pictures.

Sometimes the jokes pretty much write themselves…

Pathetic

Posted on April 24, 2008

From The Hill magazine, “Dems Hedge on Healthcare“:

Congressional Democrats are backing away from healthcare reform promises made by their two presidential candidates, saying that even if their party controls the White House and Congress, sweeping change will be difficult.

It is still seven months before Election Day, but already senior Democrats are maneuvering to lower public expectations on the key policy issue…

Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), a member of Senate Democratic leadership and a key Hillary Clinton ally who also sits on the Finance Committee, said he is “not sure we have the big plan on healthcare.”

“Healthcare I feel strongly about, but I am not sure that we’re ready for a major national healthcare plan,” Schumer said.

Schumer said he would focus “on prevention above all and cost cutting until we can get a national healthcare plan.”

Hardy Heron is Coming!

Posted on April 21, 2008

Ubuntu 8.04 (code name “Hardy Heron”) ships this week:

Lots of new features coming for Ubuntu and for Kubuntu. I can’t wait.

The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: Highlights

Posted on April 18, 2008

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to visit the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, their annex facility out by Dulles International Airport.

Longtime Readers™ will know that I’m a complete airplane geek. So I took the opportunity, and I brought my cameraphone with me. The result is a new Flickr photoset with nearly 50 photos of what I thought were the highlights of their collection.

I’ve taken the time to mark up each photo with a short essay that explains what you are looking at, why it’s significant, and how it fits into the history of aviation. So if you’re an airplane geek, a history geek, or just a geek, I hope you enjoy browsing through it.

IraqRoll’d: The John McCain Rickroll

Posted on April 14, 2008

I got tired of hearing John McCain try to run away from his “we’ll be in Iraq for 100 years” comment, so I made this video:

Share and enjoy!

(If you’re curious about the choice of music — it’s a rickroll, so there’s really only one song to choose from.)

“Sheer Technological Ineptitude”

Posted on April 10, 2008

Hey kids!

Remember back in August 2006, when Joe Lieberman’s campaign Web site crashed on the day of the Connecticut Democratic primary, and Lieberman’s campaign claimed that his opponent’s people had hacked their servers to knock them offline?

And remember how I told you that was bullshit, and that the real reason was most likely that Lieberman’s Web people were a bunch of doorknobs?

Well, the FBI investigated and concluded that I was right:

It seemed to be the ultimate political dirty trick of the digital age: crashing an opponent’s Web site on the eve of a primary election in order to disrupt an opponent’s last-minute efforts. Or so the campaign of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut charged in 2006 when its site crashed the day before the upset victory of the challenger, Ned Lamont, in the Democratic primary.

Mr. Lieberman still went on to win re-election in November as an independent. Then, in December 2006, the state attorney general and the United States attorney, in response to a Lieberman request for an investigation, reported that they had found no evidence of foul play.

Now an F.B.I. e-mail message from October 2006 has been disclosed, saying that its investigation — also in response to a request by the Lieberman camp — showed that it was not angry bloggers or Mr. Lamont’s insurgent campaign workers who rendered the site inaccessible, but sheer technological ineptitude…

“The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured,” [The Stamford Advocate] said the F.B.I. wrote. “There was no evidence of (an) attack.”

“Overutilized and misconfigured”. Sounds a lot like what I wrote at the time:

Apparently Joe2006.com is hosted on an el cheapo shared hosting plan. If that’s the case, it’s easy to imagine that the site went down due to a simple spike in usage (it is primary day, and their primary is being closely watched across the country) rather than any malicious action.

Just Well Mixed: where you can read the stories that will appear in next year’s New York Times, today!

You’re Not Helping

Posted on April 7, 2008

I saw this on the shelves at the local Barnes & Noble when I was browsing the other day, and thought wow, that’s harsh:

I mean, I know they’ve made a ton of money coming up with a “… for Dummies” book for every possible subject. But calling the audience for this one names seems a tad cruel, ya know?

Everything Old is New Again

Posted on April 2, 2008

You may not have noticed, but Monday was the ten-year anniversary of the birth of the Mozilla project.

Specifically, it was the anniversary of Netscape’s release of the source code for its Web browser — an event which made possible the creation of Firefox and which eventually broke Microsoft’s monopoly on the Web browser market (though the path to get there was longer and stranger than anyone at Netscape probably imagined at the time).

To mark the occasion, Jamie Zawinski (one of the original Netscape programmers and the current proprietor of the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco) has resurrected a bit of Internet history — the original Web site for the Mosaic Communications Corporation, which is what Netscape called itself before it called itself Netscape. You can view it today at the same URL it was found at in 1994 — http://home.mcom.com — and all the content on the site dates from ’94 as well, since that was just before the company released the first beta of the Netscape browser and officially became a Big Deal.

If you want to complete the paleo-Web experience, Zawinski has also put together a collection of old versions of Netscape that you can download and use to view the site (and any other sites you care to try — though odds are most modern sites will fail in dramatic and/or hilarious ways). The collection goes all the way back to Netscape 0.4, so you can get a 1994-vintage browser to go along with the 1994-vintage Web site.

I first discovered the Web myself early in 1994, so if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wallow in nostalgia for a while…

The Things You Find While Cleaning Out Your Closet

Posted on March 27, 2008

Things like this:

That’s me in my Civil Air Patrol uniform (I’ve written before in this space about my experiences in the CAP). The uncropped full-size version of the photo contains a timestamp that shows it was taken on June 9, 1989. That would put the me in that picture at a month shy of 14 years old.

I really need to clean my closets out more often.

Fun With Spam: There Are Ten AGAIN??? Edition

Posted on March 24, 2008

I’m guessing that to get the list up to ten, they had to include a few that involve using your feet.

Fun With Spam: There Are TEN??? Edition

Posted on March 14, 2008

I’m guessing #1 is “Hey, I found where you left your clothes!”

What’s Your Meez?

Posted on March 12, 2008

I’m a big fan of Anthony Bourdain.

Not as a cook, particularly — I have never eaten anything he’s cooked, so how would I know if he’s any good or not — but as a writer and a personality. His book Kitchen Confidential is an hilarious and insightful look into the high-pressure life of a chef in New York’s insanely competitive restaurant world, and his travel show, No Reservations, in which he filters each of his destinations through the perspective of an omnivorous foodie, is excellent television.

I have Bourdain to thank for introducing me to the concept of mise en place, a term of art for chefs that also has a lot of applicability for geeks. I’ll let Bourdain’s pal Michael Ruhlman explain what mise entails:

Literally “put in place,” mise en place is the kitchen term for your set up, the gathering and preparation of all the tools and food you need to complete the task at hand; mise en place can refer to a cook’s organization on the line before the evening’s service (line cooks often refer to it simply as “meez” and can be extremely territorial about their own); mise en place can refer to the wooden spoon, wine, stock, rice, and salt you gather before starting a risotto. Because it’s such an important part of the chef’s life, so critical to efficiency of action and the use of time, the term often carries broader connotations of being ready. Excellent mise represents the ultimate state of preparedness, whether the physical mise en place of food and tools or the mental mise en place of having thought a task through to the end and being ready for each step of it.

For a chef, meez means what tools and ingredients you keep immediately at hand, and how you organize them. Which knives do you keep close? Which seasonings? Which ingredients? A glance at a chef’s meez tells you not just what they cook, but how they cook — what their approach is, what mindset they bring to their dishes.

The idea that meez can be found in the world of programmers as well as chefs is not a new one; Jeff Atwood explored it nearly two years ago. But to my surprise — Atwood is a super sharp writer and tech observer — he got it exactly backwards:

The concept of mise en place should be familiar to software developers. It’s why every member of the team has their development system set up identically. It’s why we use a common set of development tools. It’s why we take advantage of existing frameworks like nUnit and Log4Net instead of writing our own.

This is actually the opposite of mise en place, at least as I understand it. It’s not about not reinventing the wheel; it’s about your personal collection of tools and tricks, the things you carry to every project in your little black bag. A team where every developer has exactly the same setup has no meez, no room for each member to personalize their toolbox.

Which got me to thinking: what’s my meez? Like most geeks, I have a collection of tools that I keep close at hand. When I sit down in front of a new machine, the first thing I do is install them so that I have an environment that I can work in quickly and efficiently; in fact, I carry most of them around on a USB memory stick so that I don’t even need to install anything, I just plug in the stick and go. (Thank you PortableApps.com!)

So what are the tools in my meez? On Windows, my chef’s table generally looks something like this:

• For Web browsing: Firefox (with Firebug)
• For e-mail: Thunderbird
• For IM: Pidgin
• For secure shell access: PuTTY
• For editing files: HTML-Kit (or Notepad++ if I don’t have install privileges and have to run everything off the memory stick)
• For editing images: Paint.NET
• For transferring files: WinSCP

Once I have these tools at hand, I can pretty much do any task my job requires from anywhere I have an Internet connection. Of course, there are other tools I use as well, but these are the core bundle, the absolute basic set that I would not go anywhere without. (If I’m lucky enough to have access to a Linux workstation instead of Windows, the specific elements of my meez are different, of course, but the idea is the same.)

The beauty of the idea of meez, of course, is that your meez tells other people something about you. Some programmers spend years perfecting their .emacs configuration file. Others obsess over finding the perfect set of plugins for Visual Studio. A programmer in the first category will probably have very little in common philosophically with a programmer in the second category.

So for all you geeks out there — I showed you mine, now you show me yours. Hit the comments and tell me: what’s your meez?

What Do You Get the Armed Service That Has Everything?

Posted on March 6, 2008

Four and a half years ago, I wrote about a shady deal that had been cooked up by Boeing to lease new aerial refueling tanker aircraft to the Air Force on a no-bid contract — at a higher cost than it would take to just buy them.

Well, that deal eventually came under Congressional scrutiny (led, to his credit, by Senator John McCain), which uncovered the biggest Department of Defense corruption scandal in decades as it was revealed that a top DoD official in charge of buying new weapons was deep in Boeing’s pocket while working for the Air Force, and then had left the Air Force and been hired by Boeing after steering multiple huge contracts (including the tanker deal) their way. The scandal led to a bloodbath at Boeing as the aviation giant fired the former Air Force official, along with their CFO, who had hired her. And shortly after the scandal broke, Boeing’s CEO stepped down as well — partly for overseeing the tanker fiasco, partly for other bad decisions that had driven the company’s stock into the toilet.

Eventually the Air Force went back to the drawing board, choosing to buy the planes rather than lease them, and opening the contract up to alternate bidders. And last week it was announced that the contract had been awarded to Europe’s EADS/Airbus Industrie, beating out Boeing’s revised bid to sell modified 767s.

Predictably, the decision to give the contract to a European company has resulted in a ton of criticism. But I’m not posting this because of that criticism. I’m posting this for two reasons instead.

First, it’s good to see the Air Force recover from the ginormous rent-a-tanker scandal and instead get its tankers the sensible way — by buying them — and by choosing from multiple competing bids instead of going with sweetheart no-bid contracts.

Second, I saw this Google ad in the sidebar of the story on CNN announcing that EADS had won the contract:

Check out that first listing. I don’t know who Shopzilla.com is, but apparently if you’re in the market for a 767, they’ve got ’em — and at a “bargain price”! Perhaps the Air Force should have called them when they issued the RFP…

Vote for Manos!

Posted on March 3, 2008

Michael J. Nelson (of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame) and his crew at Rifftrax have taken on a target that is in desperate need of some snark: political commercials.

Here’s the Rifftraxed version of a Hillary Clinton ad:

And here they take an Obama spot and use it to finally explain what kind of change Obama will bring:

…and here’s the complete archive of their RiffTraxed commercials.

You know, if this makes you miss the good old days of MST3K, I highly recommend that you swing over to RiffTrax.com and buy a riff. Rifftrax are cheap (generally just $3-4), and they give new life to your DVD collection by giving you a MST-ified version of your movies to enjoy. Here’s a collection of free samples you can watch online, if you want to try before you buy; I have purchased several RiffTrax and enjoyed them all greatly, so they have my recommendation.

UPDATE (March 4): Dammit, this one is too good for me to leave out:

Amazon MP3 Downloader Now Available for Linux

Posted on March 1, 2008

Well, it took them a few months, but guess what: Amazon has quietly released the Linux version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader software required to buy albums through their DRM-free music store.

Even better, they have it packaged up ready to go for just about every major distro out there: there are packages available for Ubuntu Gutsy, Debian Etch, Fedora 8, and OpenSUSE 10.3.

I have bought several albums through the Amazon MP3 store (downloading them via my Windows partition), and I can testify that the service is groundbreaking: reasonably priced music that you can download directly and play back on any device that plays MP3s. It’s better than the iTunes Music Store (which requires you to have an iPod to play your music back, and which loads each track with anti-copying DRM code that prevents you from freely moving your music) in just about every way imaginable. And on top of all that, Amazon’s prices are usually lower than Apple’s, too.

Oh yeah, and if you decided the Amazon MP3 store wasn’t for you when they launched with only two major labels, they’ve now got the rights to distribute music from all of the big labels. So you will be hard pressed to find a band whose music isn’t available in there.

So what the hell are you waiting for? This is the perfect digital music service. If you’ve been waiting to take the plunge into purchasing downloadable music, wait no longer.

Hooked On Novick

Posted on February 29, 2008

I believe I may have found the ideal candidate for the U.S. Pirate Party: Oregon’s Steve Novick.

Why?

So a U.S. Senate candidate with a metal hook for a left hand walks into a bar.

The candidate, Steve Novick, has bellied up next to a voter and the two talk about politics. The other guy struggles to twist off a beer cap. Novick coolly reaches over, grabs the bottle and deftly uses his metal hook to pop it open, telling the other man: “We can’t afford just politics as usual.”

It’s a political ad unlike any other this season, and the video has become a hit on YouTube.

And here’s the ad:

Problems

Posted on February 26, 2008

You know, if this is the biggest problem you have in your life, you should probably spend more time counting your blessings and less time writing anguished letters to advice columnists…

Separated at Birth: Vicki Iseman Edition

Posted on February 21, 2008

John McCain’s alleged lobbyist gal-pal, Vicki Iseman, from her quickly-deleted bio page on her firm’s Web site:

… and “Kitty” from Arrested Development:

We report, you decide…

UPDATE: In fairness to Ms. Iseman, I don’t do too well on the “separated at birth” test myself.

What This Country Needs

Posted on February 18, 2008

… is a movement to get the people in charge to take the Fourth Amendment — which defines our right to live without fear of government surveillance — as seriously as they take the Second Amendment.

Any time someone proposes a gun control measure, the legal wonks start parsing the words of the Second Amendment as if they were scholars arguing over some passage in the Talmud. Intense debates erupt over the precise meaning of phrases such as “well-regulated militia”, “right of the people”, and “keep and bear arms”. (Indeed, the Supreme Court will decide the future of Washington, D.C.’s handgun control laws next month in a case that hinges on whether or not the words “well-regulated militia” imply that there is only a collective right to have access to firearms, rather than an individual one.)

You would think that those wanting to carve holes in the Fourth Amendment would have to be even more creative than those wanting to carve holes in the Second, since unlike the Second Amendment, the wording of the Fourth is admirably clear:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

And yet, despite this clarity, the Fourth Amendment has essentially been reduced to meaninglessness thanks to a raft of exceptions that the courts have recognized over the decades.

Most troublingly, over the last 100 years there has been a willingness to view citizens’ electronic communications as somehow different than printed communications, and therefore subject to a looser standard when it comes to your rights to be secure from government searches. Despite affirmations of the Fourth Amendment’s relevance to electronic communications in cases like Katz v. United States, successive Administrations — arguing the existence of national security threats that could only be headed off with broad powers to surveil — have implemented a range of shadowy programs that skirt the edges of existing law.

The best advice anyone can be given regarding the privacy of their electronic communications is to assume you are being monitored at all times. How on Earth is this consistent with the desire of the Founders to guard their “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches”?

There is one clear reason why lawmakers take the wording of the Second Amendment so seriously — because of the existence of a well-organized lobby, the National Rifle Association, that both advocates strenuously for such a literalist view of the Amendment, and intervenes politically to reward those who share this view and punish those who do not.

The Fourth Amendment lacks such a champion. While both the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are doing important work to protect our right to privacy, neither organization has as a central focus the goal of shifting the terms of the debate from where they are today to a place where the words of the Amendment are respected literally, and where exceptions must be provided with iron-clad justifications to be taken into consideration.

In other words, somebody needs to start moving the Overton Window on this issue — shifting the actual terms of the debate, rather than just responding reactively to each new affront to our liberties.

Is there anybody out there who has taken up this challenge?