A visit from Miranda

by

Miranda at Neighbors

Had a very pleasant weekend — just staying at home and relaxing for most of it, but yesterday evening spent a good few hours visiting with Miranda, who had come out to visit. She and her friend Ryan had spent Friday with Ryan’s frend Marty down in Vancouver, WA, and then the three of them came up to Seattle on Saturday evening so that Miranda and I could visit. Was a lot of fun — I keep telling her we’ve got to get together more often than just once a year! ;)

Much of the fun of the evening was meeting Ryan and Marty. Miranda and I had made plans to go out to a couple of the clubs here while she was in town, and as the two that I know best are Neighbors and the Vogue, those were our destinations for the night. While I didn’t have any worries about Miranda fitting in at my usual haunts, it was a little entertaining shepherding Ryan and Marty along with us — cowboy hats, while not completly out of place at Neighbors, aren’t often seen in the goth/industrial domain of the Vogue!

Still, they’re both good guys, and it made for a fun evening. Trish, one of the people I’ve met at the Vogue came up and talked with Marty for a while after checking with me first to make sure it’d be okay, since I was obviously with the two of them. Her first question ‐ “So, do you feel a little out of place here?” As it turns out, they’d been a bit worried at first, but quickly realized that they were perfectly safe, and nobody was going to screw with them. Didn’t surprise me, of course, but it was fun to watch the initial reactions.

All in all, a very fun evening — a little drinking, a little dancing, and a lot of catching up, until they had to head back down to Vancouver to sleep and prepare for the drive back home today.

Always good to see old friends again. Now, who’s next to visit Seattle? ;)

Honda Accord ad

by

This new ad for the Honda Accord (QuickTime required) is a definite must-see. It’s just grabbed a spot as my third-favorite commercial of all time.

[Update:]{.underline}

Even more jaw-droppingly amazing: this commercial isn’t faked! What you see in the commercial is one successful two-minute long shot — no trick photography, no CGI. Wow. (via MeFi)

For the curious, my second-favorite ad is the “Rainier Beer Motorcycle” ad of the late 80’s. Very simple — just someone riding a motorcyle across the landscape — but even today, if you go up to just about anyone who watched TV during the time it was on, they’ll remember it. The kicker? The whine of the engine was a long, drawn-out, “Raaaaaaaiiiiiiii…[gear change]nniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeerrrrrrrr…[gear change]beeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrr….”

All-time favorite ad, though, for quite a few reasons, is the Apple Computer ‘1984‘ ad. Apple Computer, Ridley Scott, 1984 — a perfect ad.

Meme proposal: YAAMR

by

A proposal for the ‘net community at large, and for Microsoft, in an effort to make complaints about/criticisms of Microsoft and its software easier to collect and analyze, with the intent of letting any concerned party at Microsoft sift through them at will for subjects relevant to their area of expertise.

Requirements: a weblog with an active RSS feed.

Methodology: The methodology from the user end is simple: include the acronym ‘YAAMR’ (for Yet Another Anti-Microsoft Rant) in the relevant weblog post; preferably in the title, though including it in the body should work also.

On Microsoft’s end, the process is also simple: create a Feedster search for ‘YAMMR’. Then, as Feedster allows one to subscribe to an RSS feed of a specific search, the MS employee could then subscribe to that RSS feed in their newsreader of choice.

End result: a real-time, constantly updated feed of issues that MS would do well to pay attention to, in order to improve relations with their current user base.

It goes without saying that this same method could be used for other companies or organizations also, requiring only the selection of a convenient acronym or set of keywords that could be used to trigger Feedster’s search results.

I don’t really expect this to get picked up, or put into practice. But I like the idea. Maybe it’d be more useable for smaller companies? In any case, there’s potential here, I think…

More random ideas connected with this: perhaps a Movable-Type powered site, with different categories for different companies or organizations (or one site for a specific company, with categories for the various software packages). These categories would be set up as TrackBack ping receivers for rant posts.

For instance, a hypothetical ‘www.microsoftrants.com’ could have categories for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc., then posts about issues with the software could ping the corresponding category. MS employees in the various software groups could subscribe to RSS feeds for the categories, enabling them to keep an ‘ear to the ground’ of what the ‘common user’ faces when using their software.

Hrm. Ideas? Questions? Comments? Words of wisdom?

I think I’ll toss this one out to the LazyWeb community. It’s not really a ‘problem to be solved’, as such, except that I don’t really have the resources (budget) to set this up on my own, and I don’t even know that the idea would catch on (not to mention that as I’m not an ‘A-list’ blogger [or even B- or C-list…probably somewhere around Q-list, I think…], there’s no gaurantee anyone would ever see this proposal otherwise). Better to toss it out to people more integrated with the various tech communities to see if any of them want to pick it up and play with it.

But what about the little guy?

by

Robert Scoble pointed to Scott Johnson’s YAAMR post. Two hours after Scott made his post, he had an offer in his comments from a tester at Microsoft to pass on information about his crash to the appropriate team at Microsoft.

First thought: that’s cool.

Second thought: too bad things like this aren’t likely to happen for the rest of the poor shmoes battling Windows (like, oh, say…[ahem]…me, for instance). Offering high-profile bloggers help after they’re linked to by another high-profile blogger is certainly a nice thing to do, and nothing in itself to sneeze at, but all of Scott’s complaints with Windows are perfectly valid, and are the kinds of frustrations that many people have to deal with on a regular basis.

The fundamental problem itself is still unsolved — Windows is often a royal pain in the ass to deal with. Most of us have to deal with it on our own, though, and common experiences like Scott’s are going to keep happening, and Microsoft is going to continue to be perceived by many people as a lumbering, unstoppable behemoth of a company that can’t actually write decent software, but doesn’t seem to care because they’ve got such a lockhold on the industry.

Somehow, I just don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Propaganda at its finest

by

Remember the heroic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch? I’m sure you do, it was practically the only story coming out of Iraq for close to a week.

How heroic is it, really, when US forces storm into an unguarded hospital, terrorize the staff and patients, and handcuff four doctors and two patients — one of whom was paralyzed and on an IV drip — before leaving with Private Lynch?

Another shining example of the US propaganda machine in full swing.

(via Alan Moult)

Long day

by

Quick bits, because I’m too worn out to bother with anything more in-depth:

  • Rumsfeld is now admitting that we probably won’t find any WMDs. So much for that justification. (via Nurse Ratched)
  • UN Inspector Hans Blix continues to assert that there likely are no WMDs in Iraq, and that the justification for invasion was a sham. (via Tom)
  • Two of Bush’s cultural advisors have resigned in protest over the lack of protection for Iraq’s museums and libraries. (via Katherine Long)
  • The American Prospect asks, quite rightly, why so much of the American public seems to placidly accept Bush’s baldfaced lies. (via Elaine)
  • Kirsten picks up on the Syria/WMD story that I linked yesterday and gives it a nice chess metaphor that puts my “here’s a link, go read it” style to shame. I knew I was going to enjoy giving that girl a website!

A sci-fi museum? Cool!

by

Paul Allen, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder and eclectic billionaire philanthropist, is expected to announce today his plans to build a Seattle facility to celebrate science-fiction literature in the same way his Experience Music Project honors popular music.

Tentatively dubbed the Science Fiction Experience, or SFX, the project will be adjacent to the EMP at the Seattle Center and open in the summer of 2004.

Rock on. I’ll let you know how it is once it opens. ;)

(via /.)

We lost the war

by

An excellent editorial from truthout that covers the same points (plus many more) that I brought up while responding to a recent comment. They do it far better and far more in depth than I do, though.

Bush’s bloviating sermons on morality in this matter fail in the face of the facts. Saddam Hussein would not have existed were it not for the energetic support of the United States. We didn’t defeat Hussein. We fired him. The fact that he was a valued employee for so long, the fact that we averted our eyes as late as 1988 to his use of chemical weapons, the fact that we gave him vital intelligence data so he could more accurately and effectively use those weapons, and the fact that we gave material assistance via government and private institutions for the creation and promulgation of said weapons, all burst the bubble of righteousness the entire debate has been contained in. Bush can talk all he wants about the evil Saddam Hussein. There is little argument with the appellation of that adjective to that name. Yet it was America who allowed him to become so, and the moral arguments surrounding his firing are indelibly tainted by these sad facts. The Kurds in Halabja who were gassed to death in March of 1988 can level a damning finger of blame as much at America as at Hussein.

(via Tom)

Tim Robbins probably says good stuff

by

Grumble. According to the Daily Kos, Tim Robbins gave a good speech to the National Press Club. The excerpt they have is good.

Unfortunately, Salon has the full text of the speech, and their daypass system seems to be broken — I haven’t been able to successfully get through with any browser on either my Mac or my PC, I either get a blank page or the browser crashes.

So…it’s probably good, and I could probably recommend reading it. I’m just not sure.