Saturday, 04/12/08

What Variety hath wrought

I have a lot of contempt, and also some bile, for the made-up Hollywood hipster vocabulary of Variety, and I hate to see it spread to smaller movie news sites and outlets. I didn’t realize the severity of the problem until last week, when the Seattle Times ran the headline, “7 Billion Gives Shaky WaMu Firmer Footing For Now”, and my first thought was, “What the hell is a ‘firmer’?” 09:47PM «

Sunday, 04/06/08

O frabjous day!

Fafblog is back, at least for the present. They went off the air in 2006 a day after I sent them a small amount of cash, and I’ve always felt somehow responsible. 09:00PM «

Things I’d have tweeted if Twitter were not currently down, first in a series

I completely approve of Summer Glau becoming an xkcd recurring character. 12:06AM «

Saturday, 04/05/08

The wreckage of April 1

April 1 foolishness is bad enough before it gets timeshifted to days when Americans aren’t culturally conditioned to expect lies (surely also one of our most unpleasant cultural exports). I’m doing dishes tonight listening to Marketplace podcasts from the last few days, and they launch into this story about how the IRS is issuing refunds in the form of consumer goods to taxpayers whose financial situations make them more likely to save or pay down debt than continue to prop up the economy with spending.

I think I just made it sound funnier than it really was. First I’m wondering why, if this subprime couple got their IRS air-conditioner in February, it’s only a tax-time story in April. I had started to figure it out by the time Robert Reich told a long anecdote about Viagra. The story ends and Kai Ryssdal sheepishly recommends that I check my calendar. It’s April 5th, Kai. David Brancaccio called, he wants his radio voice back. 11:59PM «

Happy Q2

Apparently I have a rule about not blogging during the first calendar quarter. It’s new. 11:57PM «

Monday, 12/31/07

Lie to me, Barack

Another calendar month of blog neglect? To get in under the wire, I leave you with the two best things I’ve seen written about Barack Obama’s maddening campaign strategy: Lambert Strether with the negative view that Obama really believes the highly effective twaddle he’s been delivering, and Mark Schmitt, with the positive view that Obama is a crafty badass who’s rooked the left in order to rope-a-dope the right. I’m leaning slightly toward Schmitt (who is nearly always right), but I can’t tell how much I’m coloring that opinion with hope — which is the crux of Obama’s schtick right there. 11:35AM «

Wednesday, 11/07/07

VNsea

It’s well-established that I am a neglectful blogger, and I haven’t finished writing anything about the iPod Touch that I bought the first weekend it was available. I’m still pretty conflicted about the little bugger, though less so than the first couple of weeks. In a nutshell, there are things it does extremely well, but “being an iPod” is not one of them.

I break radio silence now to praise VNsea, the first fabulously useful third-party iPhone/Touch app I’ve seen. It’s a full-on VNC client, capable of displaying remote computers’ displays in full color. Versions previous to .5 were pretty much read-only, but .5 is a vast improvement, delivering resizability, rotation support, and a full keyboard, including a row of buttons substituting for modifier keys. The password is still stored and displayed in plain text, which limits its utility in even the least security-conscious situations, but it’s a tremendously impressive piece of work. 10:59PM « | Comments (0)

Saturday, 09/15/07

Kashrut

I stopped for something resembling breakfast this morning at a kosher Noah’s Bagels tucked into a grocery store. I learned it was kosher some time ago when I asked why they didn’t carry asiago, my gateway bagel. Today, while standing in a long line of Washington Husky football fans engaged in varying degrees in public displays of affection (their poor team not yet having lost 33-14), I found myself confronting the store’s framed kosher certification, which included these two fascinating addenda, emphasis in original:

Sliced bagels are only Pareve if sliced by machine. Hand-sliced bagels are considered dairy.

The Egg Mit Bagel and Breakfast Panini are only acceptably kosher when the customer turns on the microwave used to cook the eggs. Store clerks will direct the customer to the microwave upon request.

I wonder how often they get that request. 10:31PM «

Tuesday, 09/11/07

Bury that lede

It’s almost midnight and maybe I’m missing something, but the eighth paragraph of this article on Guiliani’s electability among conservatives drops this nugget like it’s nothing:

Six of 10 Republicans surveyed, including an equal number of conservatives, said they would be willing to vote for someone whose views were less conservative than their own if they believed the candidate was electable.

In other words, four in ten Republicans, and an equal number of the furthest right Republicans, tell pollsters they won’t vote for someone less conservative than they are even if it means losing an election. It’s the sort of tough talk that I’m inclined to dismiss as predictive of behavior, but in this case, considering the weakness of the Republican field of candidates, it’s a shock just that so many ostensible voters said it. 12:01AM «

Sunday, 08/19/07

Netflix

Eye-popping graf from a story about Netflix’s new emphasis on 24-hour high-quality customer service (to the exclusion of email-based support):

Ms. Funk, 36, said some people call because they are lonely. Her lengthiest call of that kind lasted 35 minutes. Others need basic help with their computers or with the Internet. Some people do not own a computer and call regularly to have a call center employee rearrange the titles in their queue.

Wow. 10:46AM «

Wednesday, 08/01/07

Headlines

I was pleasantly surprised that this headline didn’t silently change a few hours after it went up: “New Heart Device Installed In Cheney”. While I’m praising the Times, this may be the most presidential-looking picture of Hillary I’ve ever seen. 09:11PM «

Sunday, 06/24/07

How to succeed in business

The NYT’s Week in Review section this week features a borderline-mendacious story on “cyberwar”. It mentions SCADA systems, the inadequately secured contraptions providing exhaustive remote operation of useful sites like power plans and dams, but contributes nothing to the question of why such comprehensive remote operation is necessary for infrastructure, how secure they are today, or how they might be made more so. It just drops the SCADA name, as if for street cred.

It’s the ending, though, as author John Schwartz reverses course and starts to pat the reader on the head, that earns the story a place in my heart:

In fact, the United States has prepared for cyberattacks incidentally, through our day-to-day exposure to crashes, glitches, viruses and meltdowns. There are very few places where a computer is so central that everything crashes to a halt if the machine goes on the blink.

Pretend for a moment that this is true. It’s also hands-down the sweetest, kindest interpretation I’ve ever seen of Windows’ systemic security weaknesses. We’re not wasting billions in lost productivity — we’re stimulating our computational white blood cells.

Next, as an integral element in national health care, citizens will be obliged to spend a half-day each week in day-care centers, hugging kindergartners and eating Microsoft-supplied hors d’oeuvres with bare hands. It’s somewhere in between the best medicine and your patriotic duty. 10:13PM «

Sunday, 04/29/07

Meltdown

For once, the word gets used non-metaphorically. A tanker carrying unleaded gas at 3AM through the East Bay’s freeway tangle missed a turn, flipped over, and turned to slag an intensely important conduit between Oakland, Berkeley, and the Bay Bridge. SFGate’s photos are amazing, and Google Maps shows the complexity of the freeway at this spot. Who needs terrorists, as mom put it.

I feel for my friends and family in the East Bay, though as an amateur transportation nerd, I can’t wait to see how people adjust to this. It’s a stake in the heart of what was already an intolerably bad traffic situation, and the obvious alternatives, like BART and the AC Transit bus system, do not have the instant capacity to absorb the extra ridership that this sort of disaster will produce.

It’ll be an object lesson for Seattle for the increasingly likely case that waterfront viaduct falls down on its own while the city, county, and state bicker about how to replace it. 11:37AM «

Thursday, 04/19/07

I’ve never seen you here before

Posted from bed. Work bought me this shiny new laptop, which is proving dangerous. The old laptop was valiant and loyal, and yet it never occurred to me to bring it to bed, read why’s poignant guide to ruby, and try to muscle the NetNewsWire unread count down to three digits. I feel a little like I’m cheating on the old laptop, but if I wasn’t working on the unread count I might not have seen this picture. I’m conflicted. 11:51PM «

Saturday, 04/07/07

Goodness

Time for our monthly check-in.

• Miranda July’s white-boardish book-promoting website. Extravagantly charming. Eclectic set of venues for a book tour.
• Dahlia Lithwick on the Monica Goodling/Pat Robertson connection. I read Slate less since they started breaking up their stories into multiple pages, but damn, I ♥ Dahlia Lithwick.
• Jeff Bingham, possibly the only man who hates the Anaheim Angels more than rageaholic ex-Angel Jose Guillen, has some words for ex-Angels starter Paul Byrd.
• I’m finding out if I’m a better twitterer than I am a blogger. Twitter comes with the self-reinforcing dynamic of quantifiable friends. I’ve always felt that my meatspace friendships would only benefit from more quantification.
• “Meatspace” is in the OED. That’s great.

Tomorrow we’ll get to my train trip. 11:09PM «