Not with my $300 million, you don’t…

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The Sonics — who used to be the Seattle Sonics until Seattle voters passed Initiative 91, “which prohibited the city from using tax dollars to subsidize a pro team unless the subsidy generates a certain profit for the city,” and are now searching for another city to house them — want to build a $530 million dollar arena…and they want taxpayers to pony up for $300 million of it.

The Sonics can kiss off, as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve always been flabbergasted at the amount of money poured into professional sports, and especially the amount of money thrown at professional athletes. It just makes my head hurt when those people in charge of such things then ask that the public — many of whom couldn’t give two figs for professional sports in general, let alone any particular team — essentially be required to pay to support them.

You want $300 million of my tax dollars? Put it towards education. Put it towards actually doing something to improve transit in Seattle, instead of half-assing your way through a series of stopgap measures, or instead of bickering about what to do for so long (or stubbornly insisting on ridiculous, expensive, impractical options, like the [thankfully, now dead] tunnel replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct) that nothing ever gets done. Put the money towards something — or anything — that would actually benefit everyone, not just those who get their rocks off by watching other people play a game.

TagMaps

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TagMaps is a really cool little toy from Yahoo’s research labs that I just stumbled across. It’s using heavy concentrations of tags on Flickr and overlaying them on a map, allowing you to zoom around the map and see how people have tagged their city. Here’s the official verbiage:

TagMaps is a toolkit to visualize text (well, tags) geographically on a map. Check out the sample applications, where we use Flickr tags on a map to build a world exploration tool.

The World Explorer engine analyzes the information tied to the photos (such as location and tags) to find the main “attractions” in each location and in every zoom level and compute their “importance”. We use the tags, on the map, in varying font sizes, to represent these attractions.

Here’s a sample of the World Explorer, centered on Seattle…

(via Flickr Central)

Resurrected

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Last April, the hard drive in my computer died, taking all of my photos and music with it. I quickly purchased a new hard drive, and let the old one sit until I could make an attempt at getting into it (a project that, unfortunately, was going to require more than the standard suite of disk recovery tools included with the computer).

With some extra money I earned over Christmas season (hooray for the pseudo-commission pay structure I have at work), I was able to pick up Disk Warrior 4 and throw it at the drive. It had to run overnight, and wasn’t able to repair the issues, but it was able to temporarily mount the drive and allow access to most (though not all) of the filesystem. I wasn’t able to get more ‘official’ stuff, like my schoolwork for earlier quarters or old mail or contact lists (basically, some of the ~/Documents folder and all of the ~/Library folder were just gone)…but I was able to bring back all of my photos and music.

So, after about a week and a half of working during any spare time I could find, all my photos are backed up on DVD, and all my music is back on my computer and at my fingertips. 17,978 individual tracks that take up 81.43 Gb of space and would require 92 days, one hour, twenty-two minutes and twenty-eight seconds to listen to straight through from beginning to end.

It’s so nice to have it all back.

This isn’t right…

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Seattle 28, Anchorage 32

Admittedly, things are looking up when you glance through the forecast through the next week. Still, there’s just something wrong about Seattle and Anchorage both getting snow…and Seattle being colder than Anchorage.

4,000 Lattes…to go?

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From this morning’s introduction of the iPhone, as Steve Jobs was demonstrating various features of the gadget (as reported by MacRumors):

10:27 am finds moscone west
10:27 am finds a nearby starbucks
10:27 am presses a button and calls starbucks
crowd laughs
10:27 am orders 4000 latte’s to go
10:27 am oh sorry – wrong number
10:28 am hangs up

Prank calling Starbucks live on stage at MacWorld? Nicely done, Steve! ;)

(via blog.ariffic)

Thomas Jefferson’s Koran

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Heh. This is very cool (that is, cool that a Muslim was elected, and very cool that he’s going to be sworn in on the Koran and not the Bible…not so cool that some idiots are up in arms about this)…

Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he’d take his oath of office on the Koran — especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.

Yet the holy book at tomorrow’s ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We’ve learned that the new congressman — in a savvy bit of political symbolism — will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

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Ellison will take the official oath of office along with the other incoming members in the House chamber, then use the Koran in his individual, ceremonial oath with new Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Keith is paying respect not only to the founding fathers’ belief in religious freedom but the Constitution itself,” said Ellison spokesman Rick Jauert.

One person unlikely to be swayed by the book’s illustrious history is Goode, who released a letter two weeks ago objecting to Ellison’s use of the Koran. “I believe that the overwhelming majority of voters in my district would prefer the use of the Bible,” the Virginia Republican told Fox News, and then went on to warn about what he regards as the dangers of Muslims immigrating to the United States and Muslims gaining elective office.

Excuse me? The “dangers of Muslims immigrating…[and] gaining elective office?” Just what ‘dangers’ are there? And this guy’s a Representative?

How incredibly sad. I’m glad he doesn’t represent me.