After fourteen trips down and up six stories to get three loads of laundry done, I really wish that they’d just go ahead and get the damn elevator in this place fixed.
iTunes: \”Alright*\” by Lizette & from the album & So… (2001, 4:25).
Geek backlash
It was bound to happen eventually. It actually probably started happening a few years ago, but now it’s actually getting news stories — ‘geeks’ are tired of fixing people’s problems.
As MyDoom, the fastest-spreading virus ever, continues to clog e-mail in-boxes and disrupt business, the computer-savvy are becoming openly hostile toward the not-so-savvy who unwittingly play into the hands of virus writers.
The tension over the MyDoom virus underscores a growing friction between technophiles and what they see as a breed of technophobes who want to enjoy the benefits of digital technology without making the effort to use it responsibly.
The virus spreads when Internet users ignore a basic rule of Internet life: never click on an unknown e-mail attachment. Once someone does, MyDoom begins to send itself to the names in that person’s e-mail address book. If no one opened the attachment, the virus’s destructive power would never be unleashed.
“It takes affirmative action on the part of the clueless user to become infected,” wrote Scott Bowling, president of the World Wide Web Artists Consortium, expressing frustration on the group’s discussion forum. “How to beat this into these people’s heads?”
I’ve always counted myself somewhat lucky in this regard. I owe a lot of my geek leanings towards my parents (specifically, my mom, in a somewhat unusual reversal of sterotype), and while I’ve surpassed them in my knowledge base, I can generally rest assured that they’re quite competent enough to avoid many of the more obvious “duh” issues on their own. If they run into something that they can’t solve on their own, while they’re not above tossing a quick question my way to see if it’s something I can solve quickly, they also don’t mind if it’s something that they need to seek “official” assistance with.
The majority of my friends tend to either be at least as computer-literate as I am (if not more so), or at the other extreme, avoiding those infernal machines at all costs. Those few that are in the middle ground — well, if they’re friends with me, they’re likely friends with a lot of other ‘puter geeks at the same time, and will rapidly discover that they have no excuse for incompetence. ;)
That said, though, I’ve certainly seen the backlash coming. One of the big benefits I’ve found to being a Mac user is ducking tech support issues. While I know that I know my way around Windows, when I do get the occasional “why won’t this work?” question from acquaintances or co-workers, it’s very easy to just assume a befuddled expression, mumble something about being a smug virus-free mac-using bastard, toss in a few pointed comments about Windows stability, and go on my merry little way.
(via Jacqueline)
iTunes: “Blue Nun, The” by Beastie Boys, The from the album Check Your Head (1992, 0:32).
Don’t drop out, Dean
Well, it looks like it’s official — Kerry has taken both Washington and Michigan, with Dean in second place.
What worries me the most about this is that it will be spun into Dean’s death knell (for instance, the Seattle PI’s story headlined “Kerry whips Dean in Washington“). Even Dean has been saying that without a win in Wisconsin, he’ll likely be dropping out of the race. Personally, I’d see this as a real shame.
It’s fairly widely recognized by many people, even if they’re not Dean supporters, that many of the issues being brought up in all of the campaigns were initially brought up by Dean. If he had not started asking many of the questions that all of the candidates are now asking, we could be facing a very different campaign season (and quite possibly one with far less of a chance of ousting Bush from office).
Personally, I’d love to see Dean stay in the race even if he doesn’t pick up Wisconsin. Even if he can’t get the money to campaign the way he has been, I think it would be great if he could do essentially what Sharpton has been doing the entire time — don’t worry about spending the thousands and millions of dollars on high-profile ads and television spots. Instead, just doggedly hang in there, show up for the debates, and make sure that his voice gets heard and that the questions that need to be asked are asked and don’t get brushed under the carpet.
It’s all too easy for me to see Dean call things to a halt after a loss in Wisconsin, and suddenly have Kerry revert to being “just another politician”. Much of the reason I’ve been (and am) a Dean supporter had nothing to do with “electability”, but was entirely because he struck me very much as someone who actually wanted to make a change for the better, and wasn’t going to be bothered with beating around the bush or pandering to special interests merely to get into office. Kerry has never made an impression on be other than being yet another politician.
It feels like Kerry wants to be President so he can be President, while Dean wants to be President so that he can make a difference.
Sharpton doesn’t stand a chance of getting the nomination, but he’s still in the race. Edwards and Clark have worse numbers than Dean, but they’re still in the race. Heck, Kucinich has fewer confirmed delegates than Sharpton does, and he hasn’t dropped out yet! As long as Dean is in one of the top three spots (and he’s currently in second, though few media reports are likely to point that out), I think he should stick it out — scale back operations if necessary, but don’t disappear. Don’t let Kerry slide back into old habits. Keep being the prickly burr under the saddle that’s keeping the rest of the delegates on their toes.
I really think that the two biggest factors driving the record turnout of voters in the current caucus/primary season have been Bush’s incompetence and Dean’s dogged determinism in speaking the truth, not mincing words, and doing the best he can. I’d hate to see that element disappear just because the media has dubbed him “unelectable”.
iTunes: “Soul Crying Out” by Simple Minds from the album Street Fighting Years (1989, 6:07).
Caucus Time
Woke up this morning and went across the street to today’s Democratic Caucus for my precinct at the Town Hall. At first Town Hall looked oddly quiet, but after Prairie (coming along as an observer) and I saw the signs on the front door telling us to go downstairs, we walked into a room packed practically wall-to-wall with caucusgoers, and figured we were in in the right place after all.
Overall, it was in interesting, if somewhat confusing experience. There were probably around fifteen different precincts all gathering in the same room, and from what the moderator of the whole thing was saying, apparently there was a far greater turnout than had been expected — I’d estimate that there were around 300-400 people there. While this is a great thing to see (in some ways, I’m actually more interested in the final turnout numbers from all the various caucuses and primaries than I am in who actually gets the nomination), it did make for a fairly crowded and noisy process.
My particular precinct had twenty-four people show up, split roughly 2/3 for Kerry and 1/3 for Dean, which ended up being the final delegate split (two delegates for Kerry and one for Dean). I’m expecting that that was probably the rough result for the rest of the precincts in the room — as Prairie and I were looking around, we guessed that the average age was somewhere in the mid-40’s or so, with most of the younger people and senior citizens supporting Dean, and the majority of the 35-50 year old attendees supporting Kerry. There were, of course, assorted Edwards and Kucinich supporters visible, but I didn’t see much evidence of support for any of the other candidates.
I was somewhat amused by the moderator, though. During his “here’s what’s going on and how we’re going to do it” speech and Q-and-A session, he occasionally had to cite examples of what would be done if one candidate didn’t have enough support to gain any delegates. When he’d give an example, he’d semi-randomly choose candidate’s names for the situation, and I noticed that Dean was used as an example most often. Kerry, Kucinich, and Lieberman were also used, but neither Clark nor Edwards made an appearance at all. Some (un?)intentional editorializing, perhaps? I doubt it really made that much of a difference, if any, but it was enough to catch my ear.
We didn’t stick around enough to see if any final numbers from all the gathered precincts were announced. While we’d originally planned to do just that, our precinct was one of the first to finish the process and select delegates, and then they moved on to proposing resolutions to be supported. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, of course, and it’s part of the process, but when we noticed that the conversation at the table had suddenly moved to debating the wall between Palestine and Israel, we decided we’d go ahead and duck out and just get the final results off the web later in the day. I don’t know much about that particular issue, but I know enough to know that it tends to get very heated very quickly, and it seemed to us to be a good time to leave.
And that was that. I cast my vote for Dean, and helped him get one more delegate for the next round in May. I’ll keep an eye on the results as they come in to see where things ended up statewide over the course of the day.
iTunes: “Skinthieves” by Moodswings from the album Moodfood (1992, 6:08).
Average Monthly Job Growth
No comment.
Robsix and Hurin, knock yourselves out. ;)
(More seriously, I’ve been enjoying the debate on the ‘Why I Hate George W. Bush‘ thread. While obviously I agree more with some points than with others, It’s been entertaining to watch things keep going [and usually fairly civil]. I keep meaning to jump in myself, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Have fun, though!)
(Graph from Music for America, via Daily Kos)
Marcel Marceau’s Greatest Hits!
As The Apple Turns points out some of the amusing things that happen on the iTunes Music Store:
Yesterday we mentioned in passing that faithful viewer djsteve had purchased a track that cost him the “best 99 cents [he’d] ever spent.” The joke, of course, was that it was the second track from The Whitey Album by Ciccone Youth, which consists of a minute and three seconds’ worth of silence. To tell you the truth, while we’re amused by the fact that Apple is charging 99 cents for a song full o’ nothing, we’re even more amused by the fact that said track contains the usual digital rights management code to prevent you from playing it on any unauthorized systems. And the most amusing thing of all, of course, is that the song has a thirty-second preview.
Well, as it turns out, the Ciccone Youth track is by no means the only all-silent untune for sale at the iTMS; faithful viewers ben, Scott Levin, and Michael Wyszomierski contributed their own suggestions, too. And you know how Apple recently added a bunch of “iTunes Essentials” playlists to the store, such as “Cover Songs” and “’70s AM Radio Classics”? Well, we’ve compiled all the silent tracks we managed to scrape together into the first AtAT Essentials playlist, “To Be Played At Maximum Volume.”
Turn it up! Turn it up!!!!!
iTunes: “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” by Kickshaw from the album Superstar (1999, 6:45).
RSS Templates for TypePad Pro/MovableType
I just had someone ask how I was able to create the four RSS feeds for my site. Here’s a quick rundown, along with the templates themselves, should anyone else want to do the same thing. All the templates are RSS 2.0, and have been checked with the RSS Feed Validator.
TypePad users will need a Pro account, and will also need to be using an Advanced Template set, as you’ll need to create a new template for each RSS feed you want to add. I give each template a name that’s fairly indicative of which feed it is for, and I make sure that the output file is also named similarly.
Here are the templates I use:
####Default feed: Full text, no comments####
Template Name: RSS 2.0 Full
Output File: index.rdf
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> <rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">
<channel>
<title><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link><$MTBlogURL$></link>
<description><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></description>
<dc:language>en-us</dc:language>
<dc:creator><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryAuthorEmail$></MTEntries></dc:creator>
<dc:rights>Copyright <$MTDate format="%Y"></dc:rights>
<dc:date><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"$><$MTBlogTimezone$></MTEntries></dc:date>
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<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
<sy:updateBase>2000-01-01T12:00+00:00</sy:updateBase>
<MTEntries lastn="15">
<item>
<title><$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link><$MTEntryLink encode_xml="1"$></link>
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<guid isPermaLink="false"><$MTEntryID$>@<$MTBlogURL$></guid>
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<dc:subject><MTEntryCategories glue=" | "><$MTCategoryLabel remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></MTEntryCategories></dc:subject>
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</item>
</MTEntries>
</channel>
</rss>
####Enhanced Feed: Full posts with comments####
Template Name: RSS 2.0 full plus comments
Output File: fullposts.rdf
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<channel>
<title><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$>: With Comments</title>
<link><$MTBlogURL$></link>
<description><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></description>
<dc:language>en-us</dc:language>
<dc:creator><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryAuthorEmail$></MTEntries></dc:creator>
<dc:rights>Copyright <$MTDate format="%Y"></dc:rights>
<dc:date><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"$><$MTBlogTimezone$></MTEntries></dc:date>
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<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
<sy:updateBase>2000-01-01T12:00+00:00</sy:updateBase>
<MTEntries lastn="15">
<item>
<title><$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link><$MTEntryLink encode_xml="1"$></link>
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<guid isPermaLink="false"><$MTEntryID$>@<$MTBlogURL$></guid>
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<dc:date><$MTEntryDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"$><$MTBlogTimezone$></dc:date>
</item>
</MTEntries>
</channel>
</rss>
####Short Feed: Excerpts Only####
Template Name: RSS 2.0 Excerpts
Output File: excerpts.rdf
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> <rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">
<channel>
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<link><$MTBlogURL$></link>
<description><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></description>
<dc:language>en-us</dc:language>
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</item>
</MTEntries>
</channel>
</rss>
####Comments only feed####
Template Name: RSS 2.0 Comments
Output File: comments.rdf
Update: The code here has been slightly altered since the original posting to account for an issue with incorrect dates.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> <rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">
<channel>
<title><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$>: Comments</title>
<link><$MTBlogURL$></link>
<description><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></description>
<dc:language>en-us</dc:language>
<dc:creator><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryAuthorEmail$></MTEntries></dc:creator>
<dc:rights>Copyright <$MTDate format="%Y"></dc:rights>
<dc:date><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"$><$MTBlogTimezone$></MTEntries></dc:date>
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<MTComments lastn="20">
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Suit measurements?
My brother has very kindly offered to get me a suit for his wedding next weekend (and he just asked me to be best man!). This should be pretty cool, as I haven’t had a suit in years…but now I need to get myself measured.
Anyone in Seattle know of a place in the downtown/First Hill/Capitol Hill area that I could go get measured for a suit without having to buy one? Or, failing that, what measurements are generally needed so I could do it myself? I’m quite clueless in these matters.
iTunes: “Ultimo Imperio” by Atahualpa from the album Techno-Trax Vol. 1 (1991, 6:32).
Bush’s Budget
Bush has announced his budget, and the Chicago Sun-Times takes a look:
The president’s budget reveals his priorities, what he truly cares about. It is not a reassuring picture.
The president’s first priority remains tax cuts, largely for the wealthy. Millionaires are pocketing \$30,000 a year in tax breaks from this president. The president wants, first and foremost, to make his tax cuts permanent — no matter what that means for the deficit, for investments in our future, for already obscene extremes of inequality in what once was a middle-class nation.
Tax cuts for the wealthy come first — before jobs, before schools, before health care, before poverty, before the war on Iraq, before dealing with the deficits. Bush proposed these tax cuts when the economy was soaring and the budget was in surplus. He demanded them when the economy tanked and the budget went into deficit. He insisted on them even as he led the nation into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And now, with record deficits, a jobless recovery, costly and endless occupations, he wants only to make them permanent.
…With schools inundated with record numbers of students, Bush won’t even keep his own promise to fund his education reforms. With university tuitions soaring and community colleges getting cut, he abandons his campaign pledge to increase Pell grants. His much-advertised community college budget doesn’t even make up for what has been lost.
Bush devotes less than 3 percent of his budget for education. Educating the next generation is less important to the president than providing for the inheritances of the next generation of wealthiest Americans.
Surprised? No. Annoyed? Greatly.
Just scanning the Google News related headlines, it looks like nobody seems to think Bush has a clue what he’s doing. Kos looks at the reaction too, noting that even Republicans aren’t happy with this.
The MS Mac BU
Last Friday, the Seattle P-I ran a nice story on the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft, which included a photo of some of the Mac BU staffers seated in front of racks of Mac computers. I read it and appreciated it, but at the time, I didn’t give it much more thought.
Today, Todd Bishop points out that a few other readers drew some amusingly suspicious conclusions based on the fact that the computers in the photo were older model G3’s, and not new G5’s…
One person who e-mailed raised the issue of the Microsoft contract worker who was fired after posting a photo of new PowerMac G5s arriving on campus. The e-mailer put that situation together with the newspaper photo and theorized that Microsoft was trying to hide the fact that it had bought new G5s. He asked if the company prevented the P-I from taking the photo in front of any G5s.
Amusing as this is…sorry, folks, nothing so dastardly!
I hate to dispel a good conspiracy theory, but in fact, we were given a full tour of the test lab — which includes PowerMac G5s and basically every other Mac ever made, as I described in this post last week. P-I photographer Phil Webber could have taken the photo wherever he wanted, but the G3s provided a more colorful background than the metallic G5s would have.
I was always a little bummed that I never did find a way to wander my way through the Mac BU during my time on the MS campus. Microsoft or no Microsoft, just being around that much Mac history (both computers and software — remember, much as we love to hate them, Microsoft has been a major Mac supporter and software supplier since the Mac’s introduction) and Mac fans could have been a lot of fun, even if it were just for a tour or walkthrough.
It may be a bit late for me to peek in their doors now, though. ;)
Todd also mentioned something else that gave me a laugh — when Slashdot posted a link to the Seattle P-I’s article, a couple commenters decided to exercise their funny…
Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit: An anonymous reader writes “Today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an interesting piece on the folks who work at the Mac Business Unit for Microsoft.”
andih8u: They make software for macs and have a mac business unit. I hope someone can get some shots of macs being unloaded from a truck.
wed128: Nah…that might reveal the location of one of microsoft’s unloading platforms…any employee would be fired for an offense so great…