This isn't helping

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A few days ago, Robert Scoble asked what we think Microsoft should do in the future, both with technology and to improve their public persona. I haven’t done much for coming up with a list of what they should do, but here’s a hint to Micosoft: this is something you really shouldn’t do:

Anti-spam activists and a state attorney have argued against a proposal pushed by Microsoft that would weaken Washingtons tough law against unwanted e-mail.

In one way, Senate Bill 5734 would expand the states Commercial Electronic Mail Act by requiring that unsolicited commercial e-mail must include “ADV:” as the first four characters in the subject line, to make filtering out such messages easier.

But it would also carve out a broad exemption in the law for mail sent by companies the recipient has done business with, and completely exempt Internet service providers — including Microsoft.

Microsoft is one of the worlds largest providers of Internet service, and a company that has an existing business relationship with virtually every computer user.

“The way its written, it exempts them from the whole thing,” said Jim Kendall, president of Telebyte Northwest in Silverdale, a small Internet service provider.

(Via /.)

Caring for your Introvert

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Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. “Introverts…are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don’t outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness.” Just so.

The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books — written, no doubt, by extroverts — regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts’ Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say “I’m an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.”

— from a wonderful article in The Atlantic entitled Caring for your Introvert (via Jason Kottke) I’m almost tempted to keep copies of this article around to hand out to a few people I know.

Catching up, part four: political bits

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Yeah, well, I had to jump back into this side of things eventually. On the bright side, much as this stuff might worry and/or scare me, at least I’m paying attention to it now, which I wasn’t for far too many years.

  • With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the smartest man I’ve ever met. If you get into a dispute with him, he will take you on a devastatingly brief tour all the weak points in your argument. But he is a careful listener and not at all the ideologue he appears at this distance.
    >

    Here is the problem I think Dick Cheney is trying to address at the moment: How does one assure global stability in a world where there is only one strong power? This is a question that his opposition, myself included, has not asked out loud. It’s not an easy question to answer, but neither is it a question to ignore.

    …it’s possible Cheney and company are actually bluffing.This time, instead of trying to terrify the Soviets into collapse, the objective is even grander. If I’m right about this, they have two goals. Neither involves actual war, any more than the MX missile did.

    First, they seek to scare Saddam Hussein into voluntarily turning his country over to the U.S. and choosing safe exile or, failing that, they want to convince the Iraqi people that it’s safer to attempt his overthrow or assassination than to endure an invasion by American ground troops.

    Second, they are trying to convince every other nation on the planet that the United States is the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to use and spending, as they already are, more on death-making capacity than all the other countries on the planet combined. In other words, they want the rest of the world to think that we are the ultimate weaving driver. Not to be trusted, but certainly not to be messed with either.

    By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and the Great American Peace will begin. Unregulated Global Corporatism will be the only permissible ideology, every human will have access to McDonald’s and the Home Shopping Network, all ‘news’ will come through some variant of AOLTimeWarnerCNN, the Internet will be run by Microsoft, and so it will remain for a long time. Peace. On Prozac.

    John Perry Barlowe, Sympathy for the Devil, via Phil Ulrich

  • This nation is about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine applied in an extraordinary way at an unfortunate time. The doctrine of preemption — the idea that the United States or any other nation can legitimately attack a nation that is not imminently threatening but may be threatening in the future — is a radical new twist on the traditional idea of self defense. It appears to be in contravention of international law and the UN Charter. And it is being tested at a time of world-wide terrorism, making many countries around the globe wonder if they will soon be on our — or some other nation’s — hit list. High level Administration figures recently refused to take nuclear weapons off of the table when discussing a possible attack against Iraq. What could be more destabilizing and unwise than this type of uncertainty, particularly in a world where globalism has tied the vital economic and security interests of many nations so closely together? There are huge cracks emerging in our time-honored alliances, and U.S. intentions are suddenly subject to damaging worldwide speculation. Anti-Americanism based on mistrust, misinformation, suspicion, and alarming rhetoric from U.S. leaders is fracturing the once solid alliance against global terrorism which existed after September 11.
    >

    One can understand the anger and shock of any President after the savage attacks of September 11. One can appreciate the frustration of having only a shadow to chase and an amorphous, fleeting enemy on which it is nearly impossible to exact retribution.

    But to turn one’s frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet. Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word.

    Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq — a population, I might add, of which over 50% is under age 15 — this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare — this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.

    We are truly “sleepwalking through history.” In my heart of hearts I pray that this great nation and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings.

    Sen. Robert C. Byrd, We stand passively mute, via Allan Moult

  • And lastly for tonight, Dori Smith posts a number of articles worth reading, including the two I just quoted from.

I still find it amazing and more than a little concerning that the best commentary regarding the current and upcoming conflict comes primarily from columnists, webloggers, and “ordinary people” across the nation, and all-too-rarely from those on Capitol Hill (with speeches like Senator Byrd’s being a welcome exception). I’ve certainly not seen anything come out of the White House that’s nearly as well thought-out or well presented as many of the less “official” arguments are (both pro- and anti-war).

Catching up, part three

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Again, in no particular order, bits and pieces from my ‘technology’ grouping in NetNewsWire…

  • Mark Pilgrim’s online magnetic poetry generator is one of the coolest online wastes of time I’ve seen yet. It randomly grabs words from a webpage and turns them into ‘magnetic poetry’ to play with. Click the link and have fun.

  • I used to use some of the free fonts from Dinc when I was making flyers for the clubs I worked at. Now all of their fonts are free. Good stuff there. (Via Jeffrey Zeldman)

  • A veritable corucopia of excellent free fonts can also be found at The Lab (warning: loud embedded audio). Lots of drool-worth text toys here…now I’m wishing I was still doing flyer work. Maybe I’ll just start playing at some point. (Via ScriptyGoddess)

  • ESPN has become the second major site that I know of (but then, I’m not really tracking these things) to move to an all-CSS layout. Good work, too — seeing sites like that remind me why I’m not a designer. (Also via Jeffrey Zeldman)

  • Phil Ulrich pointed to someone’s experiment with shoehorning a G4 and a PC into a single box, calling it the “world’s first schizophrenic computer”. To that, I humbly present the circa-1994 PowerMac 6100 PC Compatible, with both a 60Mhz PowerPC 601 and a 66Mhz 486DX/2 processor! Rather bizarre machines to play with, actually.

  • Phil’s also released EspressoBlog 2.1.1, a very nice weblog posting program that I use for posting to this weblog. As a bonus, he managed to implement every single idea I tossed his way in an e-mail conversation last week, even a couple that I wasn’t sure would be possible. Damn cool. And I love the hat.

  • Aaron paints an optimistic — and very plausible — picture of the wireless future. One of these days I’ll have to jump on the wireless bandwagon. All things with time, though.

  • The 10 habits of highly annoying bloggers. Eight of these I think I’m safe on, but numbers 2 and 8 (each of which can be summarized as “not enough really original content”) I’m still working on. Too much of this blog is of the link/comment style, and I keep meaning to do add more originality. Even I like it when I do manage to come up with something, so I should do it more often.

  • A good caveat regarding Amazon Associate links from Jason Kottke. I know that there’s quite a few of my links that fall into the ‘won’t work’ category — maybe it’s a good thing that nobody every buys anything from my Amazon links!

  • MovableType 2.63 is released, soon to be installed here.

  • Ready.gov gets Fark’ed (warning: image heavy, broadband recommended). Hilarious. (Via Phil Ulrich)

Catching up, part two

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This time, the focus is on Macintosh goodies. All you PC-using heathens can read on in wistful fantasyland, or just find something else to do — like reinstall Windows again. ;)

  • Enough people linked to PerversionTracker that I finally had to take a look. Looks like I’ve got another regular read! Any site that the Opera webbrowser has “taken the cake, and it is filled with plague and cottage cheese,” and that it is “slower than a squashed waterbear” defintely gets my approval. (Via Brent Simmons, along with many other Mac-based weblogs)

  • I’m probably the last Mac afficionado to find out about this, but it looks like Safari is actually going to get tabs. Nifty! (Via MacSlash, MacRumors and others)

  • This could be a fun toy to play with: VoiceBox, a tiny app that will take text files and convert them to audio files using the Mac’s speech synthesis. It will even ‘read’ RSS feeds, so I could listen to websites on my iPod while going to work! Useful? Dunno yet. Cool, though. (Via Rael Dornfest)

Playing catchup

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I’m skimming over a lot of stuff in my newsreader (758 new items after being out of touch for a week!), but in no particular order, here’s some of the stuff that caught my eye…

  • Snowmen are good, but snowwomen — at least those with breasts — are bad! (Via Jodi)

  • Bush: “Thanks for letting me kill your husband — mind if I make sure your kid is an idiot, too?” Apparently, children of military families don’t need a good education, according to the powers that be. (Via Paul Hoffman)

  • Heaven forbid someone not agree with the U.S.! Since Germany has expressed a dissenting opinion about the push for war with Iraq, the U.S. is planning (at the behest of Rumsfeld) to withdraw all American troops and bases from German in order to “harm the German economy to make an example of the country for what US hawks see as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s ‘treachery’.” (Also via Paul Hoffman)

And that’s it for now, I’ve gotta head to work. More tonight, I’m sure.

Need some free shoes?

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Need a new pair of shoes? Head down to the beach, if you’re in the Pacific Northwest…

Enough soggy Nike basketball shoes to outfit every high school team in the state are drifting through the Pacific Ocean toward Alaska after spilling from a container ship off Northern California.

There’s just one hitch to finding a free pair.

“Nike forgot to tie the laces, so you have to find mates,” said Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who tracks sneakers, toys and other flotsam across the sea. “The effort’s worth it ’cause these Nikes have only been adrift a few months. All 33,000 are wearable!”

A beachcomber told Ebbesmeyer about the shoe spill after finding two new blue-and-white EZW men’s shoes washed up near Queets on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula on Jan. 9 and 16.

Unfortunately, they were sizes 10 1/2 and 8 1/2. Both were lefts.

(From the Anchorage Daily News, via Dad)

He's got a point

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If anyone in [My Fair Lady] was gay, it had to be Higgins and Pickering — you’re telling me two single men in their late fifties who live together and enjoy speaking properly and dressing Audrey Hepburn in fabulous outfits aren’t?

— from ‘Will and Grace’ (Thanks to Prairie for sending this to me!)

Back online

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We’re back!

Sorry about the downtime. In the end, I have to admit that it all boils down to one simple thing — money matters aren’t my strong point.

I was facing a bit of a money crunch last month, so made the choice to let my phone bill slide a bit in order to pay rent. So, rent got paid, but the phone bill wasn’t right away. Normally, this isn’t a problem — when your bill goes late, Qwest does a ‘soft disconnect’ where you can receive calls but not place calls, which as a side affect allows a DSL connection to stay active. It’s only after being in the ‘soft disconnect’ state for a week or so that they’ll come out and do a physical disconnect of the wires, which takes all phone service (and DSL service) down.

I actually did get back to Qwest to pay the phone bill in an effort to keep things from going down — unfortunately, I got them paid the same day that the physical disconnect order went in, and everything was cut. Then, since it was a complete physical disconnect, I had to place an entirely new phone order, and wait for Qwest to get around to coming out and reconnecting the lines, which happened at some point before 10am Seattle time today.

On the upside, though, I was able to keep the same phone number, and the DSL connection came back up along with the phone line (which Speakeasy had actually indicated would not happen), so everything is all up, running, and hunky-dory again. Woohoo!

Now I get to try to catch up with the last week’s worth of happenings that I’ve missed. Ooh, that’ll be fun!

Movie Quiz

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A movie quiz from Dave Hyatt. I didn’t want to open up his comments to make my stab at the answers, since I’d probably see other people’s answers, so I’m doing it via Trackback. I’ll start with the quiz, and put my answers in the rest of this post. You can use the comments if you want to play along, too!

  1. “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
  2. “I came here to do two things: chew some bubble gum and kick some ass. And I’m all outta bubble gum!”
  3. “…also left a man’s decapitated body lying on the floor next to his own severed head. A head, which at this time, has no name.” “I know his name!”
  4. “Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.”
  5. “Anyway, David, when they find out who we are they’ll let us out.” “When they find out who you are they’ll pad the cell.”
  6. “Do you think there really are people who can just go up and say, ‘Hi, babe. Name’s Charles. This is your lucky night’?” “Well, if there are, they’re not English.”
  7. “A hundred million terrorists in the world and I gotta kill one with feet smaller than my sister.”
  8. “The first boy I ever kissed ended up in a coma for three weeks. I can still feel him inside my head. It’s the same with you.”
  9. “Just so we’re clear, you stole a car, shot a bouncer, and had sex with two women?”
  10. “Yeah, man just kinda…you know, you got these claws and you’re staring at these claws and you’re thinking to yourself, and with these claws you’re thinking, ‘How am I supposed to kill this bunny, how am I supposed to kill this bunny?'”

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