From The “I Posted WHAT???” Department

Posted on September 16, 2003

The Smoking Gun is reporting that the official Web site of the Office of the State Court Administrator in Colorado posted a set of documents from the Kobe Bryant case that, in several places, provided the complete name and address of Kobe’s (heretofore anonymous) alleged victim. Don’t bother looking for those docs now, they’re long gone, but TSG has thoughtfully archived them on their site — with the woman’s name fuzzed out, of course (gotta draw the line somewhere).

D’oh!

Clark is (Almost Certainly) In

Posted on September 15, 2003

Well, it looks like after months of playing footsie with the Democratic Party, General Wesley Clark has apparently decided to run for President after all. This is not too terribly unexpected, since Clark has been practically begging the party to offer him the nomination, but it’s interesting to see it finally happening nonetheless.

I’m sure Clark is a fine man and will make a strong candidate, but I must admit I found the whole “please-draft-me” business pretty off-putting. Nobody likes too much ambition in a candidate, but there’s something equally nauseating about somebody who makes a big show of having to be dragged kicking and screaming into leadership. And let’s face it, it kinda looks like most of the kicking and screaming was coming from Clark himself — in the end it’s not like there’s just so many people crying out for him that Clark couldn’t in good conscience say no.

Let’s get a sense of the scope of the “Draft Wes Clark” movement by having a look at the numbers of people registered nationally with meetup.com. Currently, the “National Clark in 2004 Meetup” has 14,400 participants registered. For comparison, that’s about as many as have signed up to Meetup for Dennis Kucinich, who has pulled 12,700 supporters. (I know that they’re not directly comparable, since Clark’s not “officially” in yet, but as far as I’m concerned anyone who’s crying out for a Clark candidacy wouldn’t care about such a fine distinction — and it’s not like he’s been discouraging people from considering him a candidate these past few weeks.) Now put those numbers next to Howard Dean, who has, as of this writing, 112,100 people registered for the next Meetup. That’s a popular movement, not a tempest in a media teapot. We’ll see what results Clark’s candidacy has on the race, but it certainly looks like it’s about to get more interesting no matter which way you slice it.

I Love Spam

Posted on September 15, 2003

Actual subject lines of spam messages in my inbox this morning, and my reactions:

• I have a secret, someone likes you.
  Yes, judging by the evidence, that’s a fairly well-kept secret!
• Are you a junky?
  If I was, would I need you to tell me?
• Can I make it up to you?
  No.
• Instant nookie, quick acting V i a g r a (GV-ProMax)
  I suppose for some guys, if you got one, you would need the other…

Dave Barry Strikes Back

Posted on September 14, 2003

I simply do not have words for how gratifying this story is.

You’ve Gotta Read This

Posted on September 12, 2003

In observation of yesterday’s 9/11 anniversary, Michael Wilson, a survivor of the WTC attack, has written up what happened to him on that fateful day two years ago and how he managed to escape. It’s harrowing stuff:

A very well dressed oriental gentleman approached me and my fly-by-night coterie (my clothes, hair, skin, and backpack white with ash after having been through the sprinklers, then the cloud, gave me away.) He was wearing a bow tie. Who wears a bow tie? He held out his business card towards me with a shaking hand. “I…I…Iwwwas llllate.” He stuttered. “I worked on the 82nd floor of building 2. Are any of the people I worked with alive?” Somewhere in there he said that he wasn’t sure he was making himself clear, so that’s why he was holding out his card.
“Well, they started evacuating tower 2 as soon as the plane hit tower 1, which was a 20 minute time difference. It’s just chaotic down here. I wouldn’t worry too much.” In the immortal words of Edward Norton “I’d like to thank the academy.” There was no way I was going to tell this poor guy that no, I think everybody he worked with was just blasted off the face of the Earth.

It’s long, but it’s worth it. Read it.

Passings

Posted on September 12, 2003

They say famous people die in threes. It appears this week is no exception:

• Leni Riefenstahl died Monday at 101 of old age
• Johnny Cash died Thursday at 71 of complications from diabetes
• John Ritter died Thursday at 54 of a previously undetected heart condition

The real tragedy is that two of these people where just experiencing real resurgences in their careers — Cash was being rediscovered by a new generation of young people thanks to his deeply moving cover of the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt” (a performance for which, just two weeks ago, he won an MTV Video Music Award), and Ritter, after decades of typecasting thanks to his lead role in the iconic 70s TV series “Three’s Company”, was finally coming into his own again as an actor with roles in the movie “Tadpole” and the TV series “Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter“. For both to be struck down just as fate smiled on them again seems cruel even for this vale of tears — especially for Ritter, who was a relatively young man with no idea he had a ticking time bomb in his chest.

As for Riefenstahl — well, she’s another kettle of fish altogether. She’s the documentarian who made such epic Nazi propaganda films as “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia“, and then spent the rest of her life violently denying that she was a Nazi and claiming that she was just a working filmmaker who was doing her job (which, as it happened, was to glorify the Nazi state). Was she telling the truth, or retroactively trying to wriggle out of the noose that was prepared for Nazism at Nuremberg? Who knows? (The documentary film “The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl” does a good job of examining both sides of the argument.) Now she’s gone, and she gets to be judged by someone who can’t be fooled by retroactive justifications. It’s just too bad we don’t get to find out what the verdict is.

UPDATE: Well, it appears the “famous people die in threes” trope didn’t hold true, at least for this particular week — I forgot when I posted this that singer/songwriter Warren Zevon died of lung cancer last Sunday at age 56. Sorry for the omission.

Hacking the XM-PCR

Posted on September 11, 2003

I’ve written in this space before about my fondness for XM Satellite Radio’s nifty PC-based unit, the XM-PCR. What I didn’t know until today, though, was that there is an online community of XM-PCR geeks like myself, including a few who’ve gone so far as to write their own software to replace the (pretty crummy) software XM ships with the unit:

• UnleashPCR (Windows/.NET)
• ReplacePCR (Windows)
• AltPCR (Windows)
• MacXM (MacOS X)
• gxmpcr (Linux)

These programs do everything the basic software does, and some things it doesn’t, including let you minimize the program to the freaking system tray — a must-have for anything you’re gonna have running all day. Nice! I’ve gotta grab a few of these and check ’em out.

Where I Was

Posted on September 11, 2003

Two years ago this morning I was in my car, on my way to work in the small town of Oxford, Ohio, when I heard on the radio that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

As hard as it is to believe now, in the middle of that report, I changed the channel.

See, the thing was, I figured it was no big deal. They didn’t have any details, just that a plane had hit one of the towers, so I made some assumptions. One assumption was that it was a small private plane, since how often did you hear about commercial jetliners (which are loaded with expensive navigational equipment) hitting buildings in broad daylight? I figured that it was an accident akin to the time in 1945 when a B-25 bomber hit the Empire State Building, killing 14 people and causing a million dollars in damage, which was a tragedy but not a disaster in any sense of the word. So I figured some idiot in a Cessna plowed into one of the lower stories of the Towers, big deal.

Then, of course, I got to work and found out what had really happened, along with everybody else.

It seems so long ago now, even though it’s only been two years. But I challenge you to read Dave Winer’s page from the day of the attacks — follow the links, too, most of them still work — and not have the feelings come back to you. Remember the rumors that flew as we tried to figure out what the hell was going on? I had only been away from Washington for a couple of years, and there I was listening to the TV blare that the Pentagon was demolished, a car bomb had gone off at the State Department, a helicopter had crashed at the White House, the Mall was on fire. Each rumor would be quashed just in time for a new one to spring up. I was trying desperately to reach my friends in D.C., feeling relief each time one of them answered my e-mail or returned my phone call. (I didn’t lose any friends that day, thankfully.)

If you had asked me two years ago if I was surprised that we’d been attacked by Islamist terrorists, I’d have said no — I’d been concerned about the threat from groups like al Qaeda since they bombed our embassies in Africa, and I’d always figured it was just a matter of time until they struck the continental U.S. (though I had no idea they’d strike on that scale). If you asked me two years ago if I thought we’d make it two years without being attacked again, though, I’d have said no — I’ve been surprised we’ve made it this far without another incident. It’s been a combination of hard work by our law enforcement and intelligence personnel and simple good luck that’s kept us safe these last two years. Let’s hope our supply of both holds out for a while longer.

Don’t Need To Be A Weatherman

Posted on September 10, 2003

You know, I’m probably not the most politically astute person out there. I’m sure you can find more nuanced commentary on the events of the day.

That being said, though, even I know this: when you’re a politician, and you start having stories like this one written about you, you know you’re in trouble.

I’m just sayin’.

Today’s Great Big Waste of Time

Posted on September 10, 2003

… is Scrabblog.

Enjoy 🙂

A Little Perspective

Posted on September 8, 2003

Washington Post — Bush to Double Iraq Spending:

In a televised speech to the nation, Bush said he will ask Congress for $87 billion in military and reconstruction spending for next year, significantly more than the range administration officials had given lawmakers. That brings to about $150 billion the amount the United States is spending on the Iraq war and its aftermath — 50 percent more than officials had expected just a few months ago.

$150 billion! That’s such a huge number it can be too hard for us to comprehend how much that actually is. Just for reference, then, let’s look at that figure of $150 billion compared to the cost of another large government project — the Apollo moon landings.

Apollo was seen as a program whose success was vital to national security. Therefore, Congress did not pinch pennies in funding it. Whatever resources the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations asked for in respect to Apollo, they got. It was the ultimate price-is-no-obstacle program.

The result of all this spending was that, when all was said and done, NASA had managed to burn through $24 billion (in 1968 dollars).

Of course, that figure has to be adjusted for inflation before you can meaningfully compare it to current expenses. If you do that, though, you find that $24 billion in 1968 translates into about $124 billion in 2002 dollars (figures courtesy of the Inflation Calculator).

In other words, the rebuilding of Iraq now looks like it’s going to be at least 20% more expensive than it was to put a man on the moon. One can’t help but wonder if the debate over the war would have been different if the Administration had shared with us beforehand that we were committing ourselves to a project bigger than the moon landings. I suppose it’s too late for that now, though.

UPDATE (January 23, 2008): As of 2008, “we’ve now spent enough to buy six Apollo Programs”:http://www.jasonlefkowitz.net/blog1archive/2008/01/alittlemore_p.html.

Rumblings in the Ranks

Posted on September 5, 2003

There’s been another instance of the military breaking ranks with the Administration over Iraq: today it’s retired General Anthony Zinni (former U.S. commanding officer for the Middle East), blasting our Iraq “policy” with both barrels:

In an impassioned speech to several hundred Marine and Navy officers and others, Zinni invoked the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s. “My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice,” said Zinni, who was severely wounded while serving as an infantry officer in that conflict. “I ask you, is it happening again?”
Zinni’s comments were especially striking because he endorsed President Bush in the 2000 campaign, shortly after retiring from active duty, and serves as an adviser to the State Department on anti-terror initiatives in Indonesia and the Philippines. He preceded Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks as chief of the U.S. Central Command, the headquarters for U.S. military operations in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

If you read the piece to the end, it concludes with an even more telling note as to the temperament of the average soldier these days:

Zinni’s comments to the joint meeting in Arlington of the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps Association, two professional groups for officers, were greeted warmly by his audience, with prolonged applause at the end. Some officers bought tapes and compact discs of the speech to give to others. [Emphasis mine]

Something tells me that Bush & Co. are going to have to either tend to morale pretty quickly, or suffer the consequences.

This Is A Gold Mine

Posted on September 5, 2003

You may have seen Lalo Alcaraz’s comic strip “La Cucaracha” in your local alt-weekly or on the Web, but check this out — Alcaraz has a Web site, pocho.com, and it’s freaking HILARIOUS. Like the comic, it’s humor aimed at a Hispanic audience — but even I, the whitest white man in North America, got a good laugh out of it. How can you not enjoy an online newspaper with headlines such as:

• First Texas Gubernatorial Debate in Badly Mangled Spanish
• Powell Urges Latin America to Seize Democracy “Or We Will Do A Coup On Your Ass”
• Jesus returns as a Black man, gets arrested by police
• Bush to staff: “Dude, where’s my war?”
• Mexican attack plans found at the Alamo: Tasty corn treats indicate growing Mexican threat

Always nice to stumble across something this funny on a Friday!

Incompetence: It’s The New Black!

Posted on September 5, 2003

It’s just like Americans to come up with a pill that can give you an erection before they come up with one that can give you some damn common sense.

I’m just sayin’…

Someone’s Got Too Much Free Time

Posted on September 5, 2003

Maccessibility points to a great page where David MacDonald has reworked the Village People’s classic “YMCA” into an ode to Web accessibility:

we’re gonna to write a new specification
it’s gonna work with the tool of verification
make it accessible
gonna make it testable
WCAG for you and me
gonna make the web understandable
make it perceivable write it tangible
make it interoperable
you know that we’re unstoppable
WCAG is the place to be
Chorus (To the tune of YMCA)
it’s fun to write the WCAG
it’s fun to write the WCAG
gonna make the internet a better place
for every ability and every race

There’s even an MP3 of the song as performed by a decidedly non-funky piece of screen reading software. Nice touch!

Reconsidering FeedDemon

Posted on September 5, 2003

Those of you who understand how cool RSS aggregation is might find this interesting. You may know that for the last several months, I’ve been using Wildgrape NewsDesk as my aggregator of choice. However, I recently recommended NewsDesk to a friend who’s new to the whole RSS thing, and to my surprise she tried it and immediately spat it back out. “Too hard to use,” she said. It never seemed that way to me, but then I’m kind of an alpha geek so I’m probably not the best person to ask about such things.

When she asked for other alternatives, I read her off a list and she went to check them out. She came back a little later rabidly enthusiastic for the last one on my list — FeedDemon from BradSoft. Apparently that program really hit a home run for her, compared to NewsDesk’s anemic pop fly.

This spurred me to go download the latest beta of FeedDemon and check it out. After all, I’d tried it on its initial release and found it wanting in many respects, so much so that I didn’t really consider it serious competition for NewsDesk. Had something changed?

The short answer is yes — FeedDemon is on its 5th beta release now, and BradSoft has seriously polished it up. Its biggest improvement is in the user interface — this thing is slick like no other Windows aggregator I know of. The interface is full of bright colors and striking icons; it’s very pleasant to look at. Setup is also a breeze — in fact, for people new to RSS, it may be a revelation, since it takes time to step you through the interface before letting you get started, which no other aggregator I’ve seen has done. They’ve also addressed one of my biggest complaints from the original beta, which was the dependence on the new, Outlook 2003-style three-pane layout, where the three panes are tiled next to each other horizontally (I prefer the standard three-pane layout, with one tall vertical pane on the left and then two vertically stacked panes on the right). Now FeedDemon asks you right in the setup process if you’d prefer the older layout, and if you do it switches over to it with no complaints. That’s a nice touch for those of us who are sticks in the mud on this question.

In fact, FeedDemon does everything NewsDesk does, with one important exception: if you right-click on the little NewsDesk icon that sits in the system tray when the program is minimized, you get a little pop-up menu that shows all the sites and stories that have been updated since the last time you opened NewsDesk. This is an insanely great way to be able to see at-a-glance what’s going on in the world. Other than that omission, though, I’d say FeedDemon has vaulted into the front ranks of RSS aggregators for Windows, and it’s going to be my first recommendation to RSS newbies who want to get their feet wet in a friendly environment. The scary thing is, FeedDemon’s come this far and it’s not even out of beta yet! Congratulations to BradSoft for what is clearly a real dedication to getting this product right.

XM-PCR Price Drop

Posted on September 4, 2003

XM is offering a $20 rebate on the XM-PCR receiver, a unit that lets you get satellite radio via your PC. I have one and it’s great for using at work — with 150 channels to choose from there’s always something on. The rebate brings the price of the receiver down to only $49, so this is a great way to get into satellite radio if you’re curious but don’t want to invest in a new radio for your car!

Europe: A Continent of Chocolate Makers

Posted on September 4, 2003

Glad to see our diplomatic approach to our allies is as well-thought-out as ever:

The United States sneered at plans by four European countries to create an autonomous European military command headquarters near Brussels separate from NATO, referring to the idea’s proponents as “chocolate makers.”

In unusually blunt language that drew surprised gasps from reporters, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher scoffed at Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg for continuing to support the proposal that they first introduced at a mini-summit in April.

He described the April meeting as one between “four countries that got together and had a little bitty summit” and then referred to them collectively as “the chocolate makers.”

Good work, Rick! Yeah, France and Germany are sure insignificant little countries. Good thing we don’t need them to, say, bail us out in Iraq or anything.

Helping a Friend

Posted on September 4, 2003

Let’s see if I can’t help my friend Ginger get the word out about a service station that ripped her off:

Alexandria Citgo sucks!

I encourage you to link to her page as well — make sure you use the exact words “Alexandria Citgo” as the text of your link. Let’s see if we can’t make it so anybody searching Google for “Alexandria Citgo” gets to see her story at the top of the responses!

Vote on New Name for Pie/Echo/Atom Is In Progress

Posted on September 3, 2003

If you’re interested in things technical, you should know that the project to define a new, open syndication format (the format that’s been known at various times as Pie, Echo, and Atom, with all those names subsequently being rejected for legal reasons) is voting on what its new name will be, starting today. The vote is open to everyone, so go read the list and cast your vote.

I would of course encourage you to consider the name I proposed (GoBright), but I’m more interested in encouraging participation generally than in plugging my proposal, so if you see one you like better feel free to go for it. Though I frankly don’t think most of them are nearly as good — some of the weirder ones, like Ack, Peel, and Zynq, just leave me scratching my head. Oh well, that’s what happens when you leave naming your product to a bunch of geeks 🙂 Some of them are quite nice, though — I could live with Jazz, I suppose — so go, have a look, and make your voice heard.

Physics 2, Business Administration 0

Posted on September 2, 2003

Here’s a very insightful essay on the organizational dynamics that led to the Columbia disaster:

Engineers are trained to ask “what could possibly go wrong?”. Managers are, too, but they use the phrase with a completely different intonation.

Indeed…

On The Truth

Posted on September 2, 2003

“The truth is what is, not what ought to be. What ought to be is a dirty lie.” —  Lenny Bruce

Not The Best Way To Start The Day

Posted on September 2, 2003

You know, there’s some things you don’t want to read about first thing in the morning, especially when that morning is your first one back after a long weekend.

Here’s an example:

NASA: Asteroid May Hit Earth in 2014

The story cites a 1 in 909,000 chance that the asteroid in question, 2003 QQ47, will hit us. That may sound like pretty long odds, but it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s substantially more probable than, say, your odds of winning Powerball (1 in 120,526,770). Forget the grand prize, it’s even more likely than your odds of winning one of the secondary $100,000 Powerball prizes (1 in 2,939,677.32). So if you play the lottery, you might want to consider taking one of two courses of action:

1. Building an asteroid bunker in your backyard
2. Learning some &$@(* math

Your call!

Steal This Game

Posted on September 1, 2003

If you’re into strategy gaming, and you haven’t played Europa Universalis 2 yet, you’re missing out.

EU2 is one of the deepest, richest, most brainy strategy games I’ve ever encountered. In it, you take a country — any country in the world, it’s your pick — and steer it through the years 1419-1820. In the process, you can either hew to the way things played out in history, or try to blaze your own trail; but the game makes it hard to do things that should be hard. Want, for example, to turn Imperial Russia into a liberal democracy? You’re welcome to try, but you’ll find it tough going, as that country starts out oriented strictly towards Serfdom and will require centuries of pushing to turn into a land of free citizens.

Sometimes your decisions can have impacts you never anticipated, too. One example I saw came in a game I played as Portugal. I decided early on to avoid the historic Portuguese strategy of dominating the trade route from Europe to India via Africa, and instead focus on attempting to find and colonize North America before the Spanish or English could get to it. I succeeded, and ended up splitting the Americas 50/50 with Spain, with the demarcation line falling inside present-day Mexico.

The unintended result came because my colonization of America blocked the English from having anywhere to send their religious dissidents (people like the Puritans, who the English historically dealt with by exiling to the New World). This meant that, while I was putting Portuguese cities up and down the East Coast, religious tension was reaching the boiling point in England. Finally, it boiled over and resulted in a 20-year new English Civil War, which ended with “England” as we know it today ceasing to exist, replaced instead by three factions warily sharing the island — Scots in the north, Royalists in the south, and Puritans with their own theocratic mini-state based in Wales! This removed England as a power factor for the rest of the game (the three factions spent the next 200 years trying vainly to win advantage over each other) and demonstrated elegantly how changes in one part of the world could have repercussions thousands of miles away. It’s a fascinating game, especially for history geeks like me.

And now, if you’re one of those folks who hasn’t played it, you no longer have any excuse — Micro Center has EU2 in its clearance bin for the low, low price of $9.95! I mean, come on, that’s less than the price of a CD for Pete’s sake, and this will give you many, many hours of great gameplay. Don’t be a cheapskate! Pick it up and see what you’ve been missing.

Busted?

Posted on August 29, 2003

Robert X. Cringely is telling an interesting story this week about Microsoft’s legal troubles regarding a suit by a tiny company, Burst.com:

“Why would a company like Microsoft do this?” asked Richard Lang, who is Burst’s CEO and half the company workforce. “We were a little company. Microsoft could have had our technology for almost nothing, but instead they stole it. We called them on it, and they could have settled at any time, but they didn’t. They stuck their heels in and won’t give an inch even now. The only way I can make sense of this behavior is that they need to win no matter what the cost.”

Cringely thinks that Microsoft’s behavior in the latest hearing for the Burst case is pretty disturbing, and after reading his account, I’m inclined to agree. Sure would be interesting to hear if MS has any defense… WWSS (What Would Scoble Say)?