Dean and DFA Tell Congress: “Count Every Vote”

Posted on May 28, 2004

Howard Dean and his new Democracy For America organization have chosen electronic voting as one of the first issues they are focusing on. They have launched a petition drive to gather support for a fully auditable voting system. The petition asks Congress to “require any electronic voting machine used in this election to produce a paper trail — one that allows voters to verify their choices and officials to conduct recounts.” So far more than 94,000 have signed, including me.

What are you waiting for?

Geek Lust Object

Posted on May 28, 2004

No, not that one.

This one:

A tiny, 3.1-pound computer with an amazing widescreen display, built-in high-speed Wi-Fi (802.11g), DVD drive, and real keyboard. The perfect thing for writing on the road.

It ain’t cheap ($2,199) but then, what cool thing is?

Don’t Use the “D” Word

Posted on May 28, 2004

How badly have Bush and Rumsfeld botched the planning for our troop needs in Iraq, you ask?

The answer is, worse than you think (and that’s probably saying something, I know). Joe Dailey sent me an article today from the Weekly Standard — yes, that noted bastion of liberal Bush-hatred — that reports that the Army is so short of troops to send to Iraq that they have decided to send elements of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 1st Battalion of the 509th Infantry Regiment.

The reason why this is a Big Deal is that these two units are not just any units. They are OPFOR — the permanent “Opposing Force” that other units train against in combat exercises. Their entire mission is to take on those other units on the training field and teach them all the tricks of how to survive. (You saw “Top Gun”, right? Think of them as the Army version.)

Now the Army is apparently so short of troops that it is going to take its highly skilled instructors — the men and women who keep the rest of the Army combat-ready — and throw them into the cauldron of Iraq. Leaving nobody to pass along these vital lessons to green units as they pass through the system.

Look. I know it’s an election year. And I know President Bush doesn’t want to do this. But it’s past time for him to explain once and for all how our armed forces are going to continue to shoulder the burdens he’s piled onto them without (a) significant economic sacrifice on the home front to pay for military expansion, and/or (b) a draft. I know that’s not a conversation he wants to have going into November — but if he has an ounce of integrity in him, he goddamn well owes it to the people of this country after getting us into this mess.

But no, he wants to avoid that conversation at any cost — so he’s willing to cut the Army’s heart out to put it off. Of course, the human cost of that postponement will be huge, as undertrained soldiers in future conflicts die needlessly. But at least George W. Bush won’t have to suffer a political risk. I guess that’s what passes for “Mission Accomplished” these days.

Let me tell you a story. Back during the Democratic primaries, I used to go to Howard Dean’s Meetups, and a regular feature of these events was a kind of “open floor” where anyone could ask questions or make statements to the group — even if they were critical of Dean. One night, a man stood up who looked to be about my age, and he introduced himself as a Captain in the Army who was home on leave from a tour in Iraq.

We braced ourselves for a chewing-out. But instead, he told us that he had come that night to ask us to do whatever we could to get Bush out of the White House. He told us about deploying to Iraq without body armor, and having to ask family members to raise money so his soldiers could buy it on their own. He told us about watching the steady progression of friends being killed and maimed in soft-skinned Humvees hit by improvised explosive devices or RPGs. And finally, he referred to a comment someone else had made earlier about how the Administration had seized the symbols of patriotism, like the flag, and tainted them by association with the war.

“You all go get yourselves a flag,” said this soldier, “the biggest one you can find, and fly it when you meet. Because what you’re doing here has a hell of a lot more to do with the flag than what they’re doing. And if anyone tells you that you shouldn’t be flying that flag, you tell them that a U.S. soldier told you to!”

From what he told us, that soldier’s leave ended a few days after that meeting. I’ve wondered more than once if he’s been among the ones who have fallen between that evening and today.

The Washington Post ran a story a while back talking about this growing trend of disillusionment in the ranks. There’s a quote in there from an anonymous general that seems more relevant every day:

“Like a lot of senior Army guys, I’m quite angry” with Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration, the young general said. He listed two reasons. “One is, I think they are going to break the Army.” But what really incites him, he said, is, “I don’t think they care.”

Decisions like throwing away OPFOR tell us that they are indeed going to break the Army (if they haven’t already). It remains to be seen whether or not they care.

Were We Gamed By Iran?

Posted on May 25, 2004

One word — ooooooops:

An urgent investigation has been launched in Washington into whether Iran played a role in manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on bogus intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, it emerged yesterday.

Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq.

According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions…

“It’s pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. “Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi.”

Larry Johnson, a former senior counter-terrorist official at the state department, said: “When the story ultimately comes out we’ll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy.”

Johnson’s not kidding — if this is true it will definitely rank up there with the most audacious and brilliant spy gambits ever attempted. Of course, Chalabi denies it — and we all know that his word is as good as gold.

Search Engine Optimization Through Web Accessibility

Posted on May 25, 2004

I got a nice e-mail recently from Carmen Mardiros at Big Mouth Media suggesting that I might be interested in a paper that she had recently written entitled Search Engine Optimisation and Web Accessibility. Its subject is how designing for accessibility can provide important benefits in search-engine placement — another good reason to keep accessibility in mind (if you needed one).

I read Carmen’s paper and was pretty impressed by it. It’s got lots of good, specific points it makes, but I thought the best thing about it was a general statement it makes near the beginning that may be one of the clearest statements I’ve seen recently of what makes Web marketing different from traditional marketing:

This is the crux of the difference between traditional and search engine marketing; offline marketing attempts to persuade a disinterested, passive audience, whereas online marketing attempts to find and engage with an already interested and active audience. Therefore, the most important characteristic a page should posses to be successful is not persuasiveness – but clarity – anything else merely serves to frustrate the user. And a major component of clarity is accessibility.

In other words — lose the cute, sales-ey language, you don’t need it. Sales-ey language is useful when you’re trying to convince someone you’ve assaulted at random with your message. But people on the Web aren’t selected at random — by and large, they found you by searching for you, making the seduction and googly-eyes unnecessary. This is a great way to explain the Cluetrain Manifesto!

So, in short, my thanks to Carmen for taking the time to suggest her paper to me, and you should probably take a glance at it if you build Web sites, for a living or as a hobby.

How Negative Leadership Screws Up Organizations

Posted on May 21, 2004

John Robb is pointing today to a great diagram by Steven Mason (PDF) that illustrates John Boyd’s teachings on how positive reinforcement by leaders can create a strong organization, and negative reinforcement by leaders can undermine it.

It’s written for military audiences, but to my mind it’s just as applicable to the business world. Ask yourself how many companies you’ve worked for where the managers distrusted and closely managed their subordinates behaved in the ways described by Boyd’s negative-reinforcement model. Lord knows I’ve worked for a few :-/

Four Detained in Iraq for Berg Slaying

Posted on May 21, 2004

Breaking story: four men have been detained in Iraq for the murder of Nicholas Berg.

Though quotes like this don’t inspire much confidence in the case against them, I must say:

[Brig. Gen. Mark] Kimmitt said he did not know who the latest suspects were or where they came from.

“I don’t know their prior affiliations or prior organizations,” he said. “We have some intelligence that would suggest they have knowledge, perhaps some culpability.”

Jon Stewart at W&M

Posted on May 20, 2004

Jon Stewart’s commencement speech at William and Mary, his alma mater, is pretty gut-bustingly funny, even on the page:

As a freshman I was quite a catch. Less than five feet tall, yet my head is the same size it is now. Didn’t even really look like a head, it looked more like a container for a head. I looked like a Peanuts character. Peanuts characters had terrible acne. But what I lacked in looks I made up for with a repugnant personality.
In 1981 I lost my virginity, only to gain it back again on appeal in 1983. You could say that my one saving grace was academics where I excelled, but I did not.
And yet now I live in the rarified air of celebrity, of mega stardom. My life a series of Hollywood orgies and Kabala center brunches with the cast of Friends. At least that’s what my handlers tell me. I’m actually too valuable to live my own life and spend most of my days in a vegetable crisper to remain fake news anchor fresh.

I can only imagine how good it was in person!

Say It Loud

Posted on May 20, 2004

Finally! Someone has made some site banners for evil, scumsucking liberals like me:

Be sure to check out the whole batch.

Are We Talking About the Same Guy?

Posted on May 18, 2004

MoveOn.org is urging John Kerry to “Go Big” — to articulate a broad, bold agenda for change.

Which leads me to wonder — are they thinking of the same John Kerry I am? Because there’s nothing in his background or campaign to date to indicate that he has it in him to “Go Big”, at least to me.

Howard Dean knew how to Go Big. But asking John Kerry to be Howard Dean is like asking Britney Spears to be Diana Krall — it’s asking them to be something they aren’t.

To date, Kerry seems to have adopted the strategy that’s probably best suited to him — the “have you seen the other guy?” strategy of laying low and letting Bush self-destruct. Given Kerry’s temperament and Bush’s string of recent failures, this is about the best thing I can think of for him to do.

I’m sure MoveOn would prefer a more visionary candidate — hell, so would I — but we play the hand we’re dealt; the Democratic party decided they’d rather have “electability” (whatever that means) than vision this year, and we’re going to have to live with the consequences of that decision one way or the other.

Hersh Connects Rumsfeld to Abu Ghraib

Posted on May 16, 2004

The New Yorker is running a must-read article by Seymour Hersh in which he charges that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not the actions of rogue MPs, but rather were part of a secret program authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during the invasion of Afghanistan that was later expanded into Iraq as well:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

The story Hersh tells is quite plausible. He describes Copper Green as a program that grew out of Rumsfeld’s frustration with missed opportunities in Afghanistan — the several times when al Qaeda honchos got away because we were more concerned with legalistic niceties than with reeling them in. So he sets up a top-secret program to allow interrogators to lean on the al Qaeda people we did capture, using harsh techniques (a la Abu Ghraib), and justifies it with the argument that it’s only to be used against Public Enemy Number One — captured al Qaeda leadership.

Then we get into Iraq, and Rumsfeld is surprised when the “dead-enders” in the insurgency don’t go away quietly. Nothing we do seems to quiet the insurgency; indeed, it just gets worse and worse as time goes on. Rumsfeld starts casting about for a way to unravel the insurgency — to get inside its head.

And then he remembers Copper Green…

I’ll leave the rest of the story to Hersh — go read the article already.

Six Apart Responds to the MT3 Kerfluffle

Posted on May 15, 2004

So I got a nice e-mail from Six Apart today explaining that they’d heard the complaints regarding their licensing scheme for the new Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition, and were making some changes to address them. They’ve got a summary of the changes on their corporate blog.

Here’s what they’ve decided to do:

• Increase the number of authors allowed in the personal license. One of the biggest complaints people had was that the less expensive personal license didn’t accommodate the “group blog” scenario, where you have many authors contributing to a single blog, very well. To address this, Six Apart are increasing the max number of allowed authors under this license from three to five.
• Offer inexpensive “Personal Edition Add-on Packs”. These packs will let you add one new blog and one new author to your license, and will only cost $10. That way users of the personal edition who have many blogs/authors can get compliant without having to get into the (much more expensive) corporate licensing.
• Making their licensing terms more generous. They’ve changed the definition of “Weblog” for licensing purposes to “a single Web site viewable at a single URL (Uniform Resource Locator), consisting of one or more weblogs as generated by the Software via the ‘Create New Weblog’ function of the Software.” This is important because many people use multiple MT “blogs” in unison to put together a single site — now those people can cover all those blogs under one license. They’ve also clarified that blogs and authors that haven’t been active in the last 90 days don’t count towards your total for licensing purposes.
• Strike the per-CPU licensing. Apparently this was not supposed to be in the final version of the license, so they’ve removed it and made it clear that the change is retroactive (in case you downloaded a copy of MT3 with the offending language).
• Post a FAQ. That’s what the post I linked to above on their blog essentially is. This is always a good idea.

These are all welcome changes, and it’s good to see Six Apart taking the reaction to their initial announcement constructively and using the feedback to find ways to improve their offering (rather than just seeing it as whiny users who won’t pay for software). But none of them address one of my main concerns with their licensing scheme, which was that it was just too complex — especially for personal/hobbyist users.

In fact, these changes, in some ways, just add complexity to the terms. Now I can get more realistic pricing, but I’ve got to deal with “Weblog” meaning one thing in the software and and another thing in the licensing terms, and figure out how many add-on packs I need to buy to get in compliance, and watch my blogs to see if any that haven’t been used recently suddenly sputter to life so I know if I need to pay up for them too…

I’d almost rather just pay a flat fee — even if it’s more expensive — if it meant I could use the software without having to become a part-time accountant at the same time.

(Of course, I can do that by plumping for one of the higher-end personal licenses, which come with more blogs/authors/etc. out of the box… but then I’m back to paying $100+, like I was before this announcement. And I still have to watch my usage in those cases — where is the über-expensive Personal License with no limits on the number of blogs or authors?)

So — it’s good to see them reacting to people’s feedback. They seem to be addressing some of the common concerns. I just wish they could find a way to do so that didn’t require all this creeping complexity.

Don’t Hold Back, Now

Posted on May 13, 2004

Esquire: Brutally Honest Personals.

(I think I’m in love with Rachel.)

If the Shoe Fits

Posted on May 13, 2004

I hear that the RIAA are a bunch of thieving bastards.

I’m just sayin’.

The Dean Dozen

Posted on May 13, 2004

Howard Dean’s Democracy for America has announced The Dean Dozen — the first twelve candidates for state and local office they are mobilizing to support. Candidates include Richard Morrison in Texas (who’s running to unseat Tom DeLay), and Rob MacKenna in Florida, a programmer who’s running for his county’s Supervisor of Elections seat on the platform that he would ensure all e-voting systems in the county provide an auditable paper trail.

Movable Type 3 Is Here — Get Your Wallet Out

Posted on May 13, 2004

Six Apart has finally released the long-awaited Movable Type 3.0 (in a Developer's Edition). That's the good news. The bad news? If you're doing anything more than one-author publishing with your MT installation, 3.0 is going to cost you — they've rolled out a new licensing scheme along with the new software. According to their licensing wizard, it looks like I'm gonna have to shell out $149 to get the appropriate license for MT 3.0 to keep doing what I've been doing with 2.661 (run two blogs of my own, plus offer free blog hosting to interested friends).

My first reaction is that if you need a "licensing wizard" to explain how your licensing scheme works, it's too complicated.

My second reaction is that I don't mind paying for Movable Type — hell, I threw $25 to Six Apart as a thank-you for MT a while back — but it would have been nice if they had kept the price for people like me, who are doing non-commercial stuff with MT, under $100. The business licenses for MT 3.0 are much more expensive (up to $600), but for a business that kind of money is chump change, so that doesn't bother me as much. For individuals, though, $149 isn't a small amount of money.

Mena has some explanation of the licensing scheme on her blog, but it only muddies the waters further, at least for me. She says:

With the new licenses going in effect today we will continue our tradition of offering a fully functional free version, there will also be a large variety of paid licenses that come with the structured support that we never felt that we could give our donors enough of.

OK, there's going to be a fully functional free version… except that the free version they're offering now isn't fully functional, it's limited in how many authors and blogs you can have. Is this the "fully functional" version she's referring to? Or is there a different one coming when the "real" 3.0 release (not the developer's edition, which they stress is for hackers and tinkerers) hits?

I'll probably end up paying the $149. I like Movable Type and Six Apart, and I'm not one of these people who has a moral problem with paying hardworking developers for doing good work (and then wonders why the software jobs are all moving to Bangalore). I just wish they had done a better job of communicating that this was coming before today. Communication is key, people!

UPDATE: Tim Appnel has some thoughts on this matter as well:

The delineation between TypePad and MT have become clear with this release — TypePad is for general users wanting to blog and Movable Type is for developers and professional organizations wanting to do more then just weblogging…

Rumor around the MT community is that Six Apart was collecting less then 50 cents (US) for each copy of MT downloaded. That is absurd for a piece of commercial software!

This outcry raises a bigger more important point which is the reason for my post. As a developer and one who makes a living writing code, this reaction to Six Apart's new licensing is really disheartening and on a certain level frustrating to see. I am a firm believer and backer of open source. I've personally released quite a bit of open source code myself and will continue to do so. However this apparent expectation of the vocal part of community that it is their right to have all great works of software at no cost is bothersome. If users don't have the funds or won't pay on principle for my time, effort or talent — how do I eat?

Like I said above, I'm not opposed to paying for good software. I've paid for Trillian, All-Seeing Eye, Media Jukebox, and many other packages before — all of which have free alternatives available.

In all those cases, I chose to pay because these teams are producing something that is (a) significantly better than the free alternatives in some non-trivial way, and (b) priced commensurately with how much better they are.

The uproar over MT's new pricing suggests to me not what Tim thinks — that people won't pay for software — but that Six Apart hasn't done a good job of communicating how MT 3.0 meets (a) and (b). If I'm supposed to pay for it, tell me why it's better than the free alternatives, and convince me that what you're charging is a fair amount to get those benefits.

Outside the circle of beta testers, Six Apart has said practically nothing about 3.0 for months, so it shouldn't surprise them that they fail on (a) — how can anyone be convinced the upgrade is "worth it" if they don't know what's in the upgrade? And as I noted originally, the pricing seems disproportionately high for individual users like me, which fails test (b). In short, if you want to sell software, you have to sell it.

Taking something that used to be free and putting a price tag on it is not selling. Convincing people that it's now worth paying for — that's selling. Six Apart needs to get in gear and start doing that if they don't want people to react like they did to today's announcement.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I think this post over at I, Feelafel hits the nail on the head:

SixApart's obscure licensing scheme betrays its new model of the blogging user base: casual webloggers, hardcore computer h4x0rz, and content management service providers. In a MovableType 3.0 world, it seems that the casual webloggers are being told to use TypePad, the hardcore computer h4x0rz are being given the free copy of MT 3.0 and asked to make some cool new plugins for it, and the content management service providers are being charged for software that allows them to offer innovative services to their clients. It's an attractive model, and I think it's almost right — I just think that there's a large, very vocal, and totally unaccounted-for group that sits between the casual weblogger and the elite h4x0r. It's these people who've advocated MT over its competitors for years, these people who've secured their own web hosting packages so that they could use MT, and these people who've passionately contributed to the MT community forums. Now these people are left with the choice of paying $100 or more to keep running their and their friends weblogs, or subscribing to TypePad. Or, most likely, going back to Blogger and getting everything for free again.

Exactly right — I was just thinking myself earlier that the strongest vibe I was getting from the MT 3.0 release was that Six Apart would really prefer people like me to move to TypePad. I'm not a Movable Type "developer" — I use and enjoy several MT plugins (all hail MT-Blacklist!), but I have no ambitions for writing my own. I do, however, have a strong preference for hosting my own blogs on my own box, rather than jobbing that out to someone else through an ASP-style service like TypePad. (Not to knock TypePad, it's just not for me.) So where does that leave people like me? That would appear to be the question.

Google Sells Out: The Saga Continues

Posted on May 12, 2004

So now they’ve decided to start accepting banner ads with images through the AdWords program. So much for the nice, unobtrusive text ads that worked so well for them to date (those ads accounted for 95% of Google’s 2003 revenues — more than $900 million!). Now we’re gonna get “Punch the Monkey” on Google just like we do everywhere else.

Anyone want to seriously argue that this isn’t connected to their upcoming IPO? This is the great problem companies have when they go public. Google’s text ad business was a nice business that generated a tidy profit, and it worked because it wasn’t annoying. But the VCs and investors don’t see that when you tell them you don’t do banner ads — all they see is that you’re passing up an opportunity to make more money. Never mind that the “opportunity” would come at the cost of hurting the business that you know works, and that pays the bills — for a public company, all that matters is meeting those quarterly revenue targets.

I fully expect to see more of these kinds of “remember how we told you we’d never do that? Just kidding” announcements from Google over the next few months, as the new realities start to set in. Too bad.

97X Going Dark After All

Posted on May 12, 2004

Sandy Smith sent me an update on the status of WOXY 97X (“BAM! The FUTURE of rock ‘n roll!”) — it turns out that the investors that they had hoped would back their new online-only format never materialized, so 97X — one of the last truly independent alternative stations out there — is going to completely cease to exist Thursday at midnight.

It’s the end of an era. You might want to tune into the Webcast while you still can.

Lucky Bastard

Posted on May 11, 2004

And in the elevator, no less.

Well played!

Al-Qaeda Claims To Behead American — On Video

Posted on May 11, 2004

This is appalling:

CAIRO, Egypt – A video posted Tuesday on an Islamic militant Web site showed the beheading of an American civilian in Iraq, and said the execution was carried out by an al-Qaida affiliated group to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.

The video showed five men wearing headscarves and black ski masks, standing over a bound man in an orange jumpsuit — similar to a prisoner’s uniform — who identified himself as Nick Berg, a U.S. contractor whose body was found on a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday.

“My name is Nick Berg, my father’s name is Michael, my mother’s name is Susan,” the man said on the video. “I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah. I live in … Philadelphia.”

After reading a statement, the men were seen pulling the man to his side and putting a large knife to his neck. A scream sounded as the men cut his head off, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” — “God is great.” They then held the head out before the camera.

Berg was a small-business owner from the Philadelphia suburbs, his family said Tuesday.

Berg’s family said they knew their son had been decapitated, but didn’t know the details of the killing. When told of the video by an Associated Press reporter, Berg’s father, Michael, and his two siblings hugged and cried.

Note that there is no confirmation yet if the victim on the tape really was Berg — though his parents confirm that he had been killed by beheading before the tape surfaced.

Hackworth on Abu Ghraib

Posted on May 11, 2004

Hack speaks out:

In 1951 in Korea, I was told by my commanding officer to kill four POWs and refused his direct order. I well remembered the Nazi generals’ sorry rationale for their despicable conduct: “We were just following orders.” I would get booted out of the Army before I went that route.

In 1965 in Vietnam, I saw a very connected intelligence captain torturing a POW with a field-telephone wire attached to his testicles and decided my personal belief system outweighed his father’s four stars. When I told him I’d shoot him if he didn’t cease and desist, the atrocity came to a screeching halt…

“The bedrock truth about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison is that they were so easily preventable,” adds SFTT (Soldiers for the Truth) Vice President Roger Charles, who researched this story for CBS News. “But that prevention required a recognition that the top people in the 800th were ill-prepared, incompetent and uncaring.”

Boyd and Iraq

Posted on May 10, 2004

Over at his new Global Guerrillas blog, John Robb has an excellent post examining how the lessons taught by John Boyd can be used to help understand how and why we’re failing in the “war on terror” and in Iraq.

Staplerfahrer Klaus

Posted on May 9, 2004

Have you ever wondered what would happen if grade-Z horror studio Troma Films (makers of such classics as Surf Nazis Must Die!, The Toxic Avenger, and Class of Nuke ‘Em High) decided to get into the workplace-safety film business?

No? Neither had I, until I saw Staplerfahrer Klaus — a workplace-safety short from Germany that can only be described one way: fucking insane.

It’s in German, but trust me, you don’t need to know German to enjoy it All you need to know is that it’s the story of Klaus’ first day on the job as a forklift operator. The visuals tell the story from there. Be sure to watch it all the way through for the full effect.

UPDATE (February 22, 2011): Well, my old link to the video died. But thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I can now show it to you right inside this post! And this version has English subtitles, too! Enjoy:

Get VB.NET 2003 Standard Free

Posted on May 6, 2004

Microsoft is giving away free copies of Visual Basic .NET 2003 Standard Edition to any developer in the US and Canada who signs up and watches five online movies on developing applications in VB.NET.

That’s not a bad deal, considering that VB.NET 2003 Standard costs $109 bought alone (and its IDE is built on the very nice Visual Studio .NET core). You MS developers out there who are still toiling with VB6 (you know who you are) might want to look into this…

Boo Yah!

Posted on May 5, 2004

At my place of employment, we have three issues we’re currently advocating on: “dirty fishing” (the practice of indiscriminate trawling through the oceans, killing all sorts of fish other than the ones a fisherman is fishing for), “bottom trawling” (catching fish by dragging a giant dredge across the bottom of the ocean, smashing up ancient coral reefs in the process), and “cruise pollution” (when cruise ships don’t treat their wastewater adequately before dumping it into the ocean — a startlingly common practice in the cruise industry).

On the cruise pollution campaign, we’ve been focusing on convincing one of the biggest and most visible cruise lines, Royal Caribbean, to stop dumping inadequately treated sewage.

Today, we won.