Is this right?

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If I’m reading this news report about the deaths of Saddam’s sons correctly, a six hour firefight pitting two hundred members of the 101^st^ Airborne Division in addition to a military task force against unspecified adversaries ended in four casualties. Two of those casualties were Qusay and Uday, the third was a teenage boy (possibly Qusay’s son), and the fourth apparently a bodyguard.

Somehow, I find it hard to believe that Qusay and Uday would have been in a villa with nothing but a teenage boy and a single bodyguard for company. Wouldn’t they have been far better protected than that? If it was just the four of them, how could three men and a boy hold off two hundred plus American soldiers for six hours? If it wasn’t just the four of them, what happened to their guards? How did just those four people die? And…and…and…

This story has too many holes in it for me to take it at face value.

Ah, the memories…

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Robert Scoble:

Kookaburra asks “will Longhorn eat RAM?”

My “official Microsoft approved answer”: too early to talk about minimum or recommended requirements. We probably won’t talk about minimum requirements until right before launch.

The answer I give my friends after they get me drunk: “yes.”

The rest of his answer is worth reading, where he explains his answer a bit more in depth, without running afoul of the Powers That Be at Microsoft. Still, this got me thinking about how much I miss the days when computers weren’t as powerful as they are now. Not because I’d like to go back to the days of 286’s and Motorola 68000 processors (ick), but because the limited resources forced programmers to weigh features against bloat, to code for small sizes as well as functionality, and so on.

The first computer I owned was a Mac Classic, with 1Mb RAM (that’s not a typo — one megabyte) and no internal hard drive. My senior year of high school, I did all my papers on that machine. I had two 1.4Mb floppys: one with System 6.0.7 to boot the computer, and one that had Microsoft Word v4 and every paper I wrote that school year.

Let me stress that: one floppy. Microsoft Word and every paper I wrote in a school year.

I miss that.

You know, as it stands right now, I won’t buy Microsoft Word. But if they could dig into their archives, pull out the source code for Word v4 for Mac and update it to run on Mac OS X, I’d pop down cash for that in a heartbeat. Best damn word processor I ever used, mainly because it was a word processor, not a over-priced, over-featured, kludgy, pain in the ass piece of bloatware with every conceivable feature tossed in merely because it could be.

But that’s just me.

English

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English is the preacher’s language, because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.

— Garrison Keillor

Boy, ain’t that the truth. I know I talk like that. Sometimes I blog like that, too, though I try not to do it on too much of a regular basis. ;)

I found that quote through Doc Searls.

Dean leads in California

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A major step forward for Howard Dean today — he’s currently leading the polls in California!

Howard Dean has surged from the middle of the pack to join the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates in California, according to a new Field Poll that indicates growing momentum for the former Vermont governor.

The poll, released Tuesday, showed Dean is the choice of 16 percent of likely Democratic voters in California, followed by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., at 15 percent and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., at 14 percent.

Because the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, the three candidates are essentially tied, meaning the race for California’s haul of convention delegates in the March 2 primary is still up in the air. A third of respondents said they are undecided.

But the showing is still a significant achievement for Dean, who ranked fourth among the nine presidential candidates in an April Field Poll of registered Democrats, with just 7 percent.

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Lieberman, the leader in the April poll, saw his support drop from 22 percent three months ago. And Gephardt, who was third behind Lieberman and Kerry with 12 percent in April, is now a distant fourth with 7 percent. The latest poll was of 1,040 registered voters, with 335 likely Democratic voters asked about the party’s candidates.

The poll also reflected President Bush’s drop in approval ratings in California. According to the poll, he now would narrowly lose a matchup in California with whoever wins the Democratic nomination – 40 percent to 39 percent. In April, Bush was ahead of the unnamed nominee, 45 percent to 40 percent.

(via Joe Rospars and John P. Hoke, my e-mail from the Dean Campaign was corrupted for some reason)

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over

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Y’know, I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but after seeing the trailer for Spy Kids 3 before Pirates of the Caribbean this weekend, I kind of want to see it. I’m certainly not expecting it to be good, but it sure looks like it could be some great campy fun.

I mean, come on — Robert Rodriguez directing; a cast that includes Antonio Banderas, Ricardo Montalban, Sly Stallone, and Salma Hayek; and to top it all off, over-the-top 3-D special effects? Even if it’s absolutely horrid, it could be a blast to see in the theater.

Guess one of these days I’m going to have to rent the first two Spy Kids movies to catch up on the story…

Geeking about Dean

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I really wonder if there are people on the Howard Dean campaign who are tied in enough to the “geek” side of the blogosphere to realize how big of a deal it could be that Dean is getting mentioned prominently by Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, and Tom Negrino.

Much as Robert likes to claim he’s got all of 18 readers (which is about 12 more than I’ve got, I think), he, Doc, and Tom and his wife Dori Smith are some of the bigger names in the weblogging world. Robert’s one of the most well-known Microsoft webloggers and a Longhorn evangilist; Doc, among many other things, is the senior editor for Linux Journal; and Tom and Dori are Mac fans and authors of several technical books. Big names, getting Dean’s name out into tech circles. Could be a very good thing. If nothing else, it’s more exposure, but given the general tech bent of all three weblogs, Doc’s interest in copyright and media issues and Dean’s appearance on Lawrence Lessig‘s blog last week, I can’t help but think that there are possibilities here.

Make sure that Dean is kept current on some of the “geekier” political battles and can articulate his stances on those issues clearly (one of the issues I’ve read about the Lessig guest-blogger appearance was Dean’s perceived lack of a solid stance on many of the issues that Lessig’s core readership hold dear), and it could go a long way to solidifying Dean’s support among the tech set.

TrackBack spam? Grrrr…

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Well, here’s a first (for me, at least) — I just got TrackBack spam. One of the posts on my other site — this one, to be precise — just got a TrackBack ping (which I’ve just deleted) with no information other than a URL pointing to, of all places, the Thessaloniki Port Authority (http://www.thpa.gr/ — I’m not giving them the Googlejuice of a live link).

Bad enough that they used TrackBack to spam me, but the Thessaloniki Port Authority? That’s just wierd. And on a computer-related humor post, too. Just bizarre.

A few new Canadians

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It was bound to happen, really. I’ve known quite a few people who have at one time or another, with various degrees of seriousness, talked about moving to Canada as they got more and more disgusted with how things were going in the US. Heck, I’ve talked about it from time to time. Now, enough people have decided that this sounds like a good idea that it’s actually making news.

For all they share economically and culturally, Canada and the United States are increasingly at odds on basic social policies — to the point that at least a few discontented Americans are planning to move north and try their neighbors’ way of life.

A husband and wife in Minnesota, a college student in Georgia, a young executive in New York. Though each has distinct motives for packing up, they agree the United States is growing too conservative and believe Canada offers a more inclusive, less selfish society.

“For me, it’s a no-brainer,” said Mollie Ingebrand, a puppeteer from Minneapolis who plans to go to Vancouver with her lawyer husband and 2-year-old son.

“It’s the most amazing opportunity I can imagine. To live in a society where there are different priorities in caring for your fellow citizens.”

For the moment, it’s not a thought I’d consider seriously. I’m quite content here in Seattle, and if nothing else, I want to stick around to see if we can actually manage to put a Democrat in the White House again. Should Bush manage to hoodwink America into re-electing him, though — Vancouver’s not that far away…

(via Brian Hess)