Small Time Television

Deficit spending, short and simple

2009-10-04T18:40:00.002-05:00

Mr. Keynes over there would like to splain something to you wild n crazy Obama-hatin' deficit hawks.

You just rented an apartment. You're told you can move in the day after the previous renter left, only to come and find out it's completely trashed. Now you know there's some good shit mixed in with the garbage, and you kinda want that good shit. So you (or, more likely, someone hired by the landlord) is going to spend some time moving shit around, stacking it, and generally taking up a lot of space -- in other words, making things worse to make them better. At the end of a couple of days, or maybe a week, you'll be able to get around your apartment just fine and have a pile of neat crap that the old tenant couldn't be bothered to take with him.

The mess? That's the Bush economy. That cleaning process? That's deficit spending. And having seen firsthand what a truly trashed apartment looks like, that shit ain't going to be over the moment someone starts cleaning. For you computer geeks out there who haven't had a clean room since elementary school (that would be me), think of the deficit as swap space. You've only got so much real memory/money to do things; you need lots more space to move shit around.

Deficit spending is not a difficult concept, people. Stop listening to what they tell you on Fox News or at Ron Paul circle jerks and learn some mainstream economics.

Some thoughts on a month with Ubuntu Linux

2009-08-22T14:36:00.004-05:00

So after I brought home the computer mentioned in the previous post, I repartitioned it with a small Windows XP install (of minimal use -- I think I only used it for a couple of setup tasks) and 25GB of Ubuntu. I picked Ubuntu for a couple of reasons, primarily because the circle of people I can turn to for support are overwhelmingly Ubuntu users, but also because I don't really like the current direction that Knoppix (the distro I ran on the old PC) took in version 6 by being a complete rebuild with LXDE instead of KDE. (I do not actually mind LXDE; it's the fact that Klaus Knopper decided to turn Knoppix 6 into a testbed for a couple of of his pet projects without really acknowledging that he'd created an entirely new product in the process that bothers me. Well, that and the excessive use of special effects in the GUI.)

So where to start? I already had an older version of Edubuntu, but I definitely wanted newer software, so I grabbed the latest version (9.04/Jaunty Jackalope, x86-32) and installed it. The first thing I noticed about it is that it is very overwhelmingly orange; this comes largely from the default theme (the Human-Clearlooks theme), but it's still a drastic change from the grey of MacOS and the blues and greens of Windows XP and Vista. Installation is beyond trivial, which is good since it seems to be the largest issue for new Linux users to get hung up on. The standard desktop is GNOME, which is odd territory for me since I've mostly stuck to KDE on my system, but it's not actually bad. However, it's pretty much the whipping boy for this entire review since, as many people less than enamored of GNOME can tell you, there's a lot of stupid mistakes.

The issue essentially comes down to control vs usability. I've been a Mac fan for over fifteen years now (my first solid experience being System 6 in my old high school) and I've always liked the way the Mac culture enforces a consistent interface between applications. But GUIs do inevitably come in for criticism, since it's very hard to make a spatial/gestural command language Turing-complete; even a macro system like QuicKeys doesn't do more than record keystrokes and mouse events, which is why for many professional Mac developers back in the day, the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop package, despite its high price, was the system of choice for its high scriptability and flexibility in automating the build process, something Think C and Think Pascal (the hobbyist IDEs of choice in the early 90s, before CodeWarrior) had only to a very limited extent. When Apple shipped AppleScript, with an event model that made it remarkably easy to operate applications like marionettes and the ability to use OSAXen (plugins similar to Unix command-line tools), the MacOS finally hit the sweet spot of full graphical control along with powerful automation and access to virtually everything a properly-written application could do.

GNOME... well, the desktop wars are probably the latest flashpoint in a long, long history of religious wars in the Unix world. GNOME has a leg up in one regard, since it's the desktop of choice for Solaris and Fedora Linux, but there are many people (KDE fans in particular) that will tell you that GNOME is a toy interface that hides necessary functions from you. It certainly fails at its attempts to be Mac-like, with a menu bar at the top that does not actually hold application menus (those, like any other X environment, go in the app windows themselves).
And as is often the case in Linux distributions, Ubuntu gives you just a little too much without ever really giving you quite enough, and the Synaptic interface for apt-get is, while usable, rather nonstandard in design and even rather clunky. I suppose that's how it is in the open source world, but did they really have to leave out a device manager app (trust me, lspci is not even close to what is needed) and include a screensaver control panel that doesn't let you adjust anything?

That said, it's not at all the clunky mess older versions like early Slackware or Red Hat were. There is a decent selection of application software included, including OpenOffice and The GIMP, and it's no harder to get up and running than Windows or MacOS. Nautilus is as good a file manager as you're going to find, mostly similar to the MacOS X Finder though it lacks the column view, and accessing network facilities is, if anything, even less annoying than it is on the Mac. Synaptic is nonstandard, but if you've got a sufficient internet connection largely painless.

Ubuntu is doing a valuable service for Linux users by making a concerted effort to create a system that anyone can manage. But it does irk me that after all this time, there are still so many rough edges and roadblocks. Considering the time it's been out there, shouldn't it be a little closer than almost there?

ATX: Why it must die, why it never will

2009-08-10T00:59:00.004-05:00

About three weeks ago I picked up a used Dell Dimension of indeterminate model. (Long story, but the motherboard (as far as I can tell, a Pentium 4/Northwood board with an Intel chipset) is substantially older than the case. Why and how, I don't know, as long as it contains what the guy who sold it to me says.) It's nothing to get excited about -- I had to cannibalize my old PC for a sound card, and the video card is a complete joke -- but it's sufficient to run Ubuntu and will probably hold me at least until I can afford a MacBook. I actually like the design -- it's designed in the same vein as the fliptop/drop-down cases that Apple used to be famous for until the G5/Mac Pro case. It's completely screwless, and the inside also replaces some inside screws (for example, for the PCI slot brackets) with latches -- you just lay it down, flip it open from the back, and have at it. I'm not a huge fan of Dell and likely would never buy one new (they tend to play fast and loose with standards and Michael Dell is basically a dullard who had a good idea once), but this is a pretty awesome case, and it rather sucks that their current cases are pretty much the same crappy single-ply ATX cases that everyone else uses on their budget systems.

There really aren't enough easy-access cases like this out there; I imagine they're rather expensive, and, well, you get right down to it, there's this slight problem with cable length and a few generally ignored issues about heat transfer and cable routing and the fact that working in the average ATX case is like building a model train in a goddamned BATHTUB and the few times I've ever seen a workable drop-side ATX case it was a complete cheezy disaster and WHAT THE BLOODY HELL WERE THESE PEOPLE THINKING anyway. The Dell case (which I have dubbed the "butterfly" case) seems to solve the cabling problem pretty effectively, since you lay it down and open it from the back, meaning you don't have to worry about yanking out a drive cable or something like that because the drive cages are right on top of the headers.

So every few years someone, usually Intel, comes out with the latest specification meant to supplant ATX, which is now closing on fifteen years old and exists in several vaguely compatible revisions to compensate for increasing demand for cooling and board neatness. There was NLX, which was supposed to replace the poorly-specced LPX for small form factor systems; there are a few NLX boxes out there, but it wasn't that popular. There was WTX which was supposed to replace ATX for higher-end boxes and had sophisticated thermal management; it went nowhere. There was BTX, which got some traction with some of the larger system builders like Gateway and Dell, but went nowhere on the DIY front and is apparently now a zombie standard. ATX, however, continues.

It was good for its time, don't get me wrong; it was relatively friendly for full-size desktop cases, but no one uses those anymore. And it might have been pretty easy to ignore the lessons of Apple's industrial design; this was during the Spindler/Amelio days, when the Macintosh was still a joke among informed techies and they blew most of their ad budget on product placement rather than actual effective advertising. But the first PCI PowerMacs should have served as a lesson to someone out there -- they were very nice to work with, as were the 630/6x00 series cases with the slide-out motherboards, and Apple went one better with the blue and white G3 models, which could actually open up while the system was still live. (If there had ever been any real market in internal USB or FireWire devices, this would have come in very handy indeed.) But Intel missed that lesson when designing WTX and BTX -- wouldn't it have made sense to put the drive headers on the left or right side of the board so the cables don't stretch in a drop-side or fliptop configuration or have to be, you know, YANKED OUT to get at anything in a regular case? Dell's butterfly case is the only workable solution to the problem of front-mounted headers I've ever seen, and nobody seems to have bothered to copy it.

But that's the disappointments of the PC world -- in a commodity business, even when someone gets something utterly and completely right, it's still based on some obnoxious compromise somewhere, and often isn't cost effective because no one else will cut into their profit margins. So Dell went back to the ATX bathtub like everyone else, because it's what everyone else knows and works with. And that comes back to the title of this post: ATX must die because it's half-baked and barely adequate, but it never will because it's so strongly standardized that it will probably be a standard for at least another decade. That's inertia for you.

There's something the matter with that Heath girl (and other observations)

2009-07-05T18:53:00.004-05:00

Sarah Palin is resigning her job as governor of Alaska, and picked the sketchiest possible day of the year -- the day before the Fourth of July -- to do it. Why? No one knows. The smart money is on a scandal about to hit, but in absence of that, it just looks like sheer spineless brittleness -- her inept public persona, her mafious political tactics, and her intolerance of dissent have combined to make her a laughing stock of her among all but the 25 percenters. The rightbloggers are trying to spin it as a strategic move to get into conservative activism or to save her energy for a run at the White House in 2012; everyone else sees it as symptomatic of being a quitter. I certainly don't think I can take her seriously as a political force anymore; while it's obvious she's never really been able to make a niche for herself on the national stage, I guess this shouldn't be that surprising.

Comcast for several weeks has been doing commercials knocking off Verizon's FiOS commercials. While I don't have a terribly high opinion of either company, I have to tell Comcast this: go get your own ad campaign. Are you trying to out-smarm Microsoft's pathetic "I'm a PC" campaign? You do realize ads like that make you look like a second-stringer, right? (Also, note to Verizon: when you do get FiOS to Cape Cod, can you please make sure there's some copper to carry current? The whole point of hanging onto a land line is to make sure you can still call out during an extended power outage; an 8-hour battery will not do the trick, especially in an area with a dodgy grid like ours.)

I need a new camcorder, and I'm a little ticked that MiniDV gear is getting increasingly hard to find. Maybe that makes me a deadender, but I still like the DV codec. Hell, I'd even be willing to do without tape if someone could make a DV camcorder that could record onto a high-capacity flash drive or SDHC card.

On a final note, I got a chance to try out the Dr. Dre Beats headphones today. Allowing for the fact that the demo station was unbelievably loud, the sound quality was pretty much everything promised. However, the price... well, I have a pretty firm policy of avoiding any Monster Cable product unless it's absolutely my only option, and I feel safe in saying that the $300 tab is probably about twice what the phones are actually worth; poking around on B&H's website, where finding a pair of studio headphones over $200 is something of a chore unless you're looking for some in-ear dealie only Paul Oakenfold can afford, would seem to back me up on this. And, hell, I checked out some reviews, only to remind myself that audiophiles would give rave reviews to a party hat scraping on vinyl siding if it cost $500 and had "reference" scrawled on the hat in crayon. So yeah.

From here on in, analog goes to the wall

2009-06-12T11:34:00.005-05:00

(Extra credit to anyone who spots an extremely obscure reference.)

Well, the analog TV era is over. I would have rather seen DVB-T than ATSC, but we get what we get. Rescan your tuners and get some higher-gain antennas if you're still getting broadcast.

Now if only some of these stations could see fit to using the extra channel space for, you know, original programming and the like...

Janet Napolitano and her permanent headache

2009-06-01T02:30:00.003-05:00

I had planned on posting some choice snark about the comedy troupe "The Whitest Kids U Know", but the murder of Dr. George Tiller intervened. The irony of the right wing's temper tantrum over the Department of Homeland Security's report on right-wing domestic terror threats is so obvious it's painful. I don't envy Janet Napolitano her job right now -- her office is probably the busiest place in Washington right now.

Call it what it is: a terror attack. The murderer (currently suspected to be anti-government extremist and likely Operation Rescue member Scott Roeder, currently in custody) shot the man down in his church and seems to have been obsessed with Tiller for years. Tiller performed the thankless and harrowing job of terminating wanted pregnancies in situations where the fetus couldn't be carried to term, a tiny specialty for which he knew he took his life in his hands every day he got out of bed in the morning. For this he lies dead, and I can only hope the man who shot him is the man in custody.

Maybe it's a character flaw on my part, but I like Dantean punishments. I want his murderer to be shivved up the ass in prison with a sharpened coathanger. And I hope that there is a doctor somewhere in this country brave enough to take Tiller's place.

Wingnut flameout

2009-05-27T11:07:00.003-05:00

Sonia Sotomayor maybe isn't the best of all possible choices when the Supreme Court is heavily slanted towards the Scalia wing, but she's pretty good in absolute terms. I've heard reservations about her attitude towards church-state issues, and that could be an issue, but overall she seems like a very solid choice. (In fact, it does seem Obama went out of his way to pick someone with a long track record -- what he said in his introduction speech seems to bear out on examination.)

Of course, as Amanda on Pandagon pointed out, the wingnut world is reacting predictably, calling Sotomayor an affirmative action appointee. Now here's a question -- is there anyone n0n-white that Obama could have appointed that wouldn't get that label? Of course not.

On Prop 8: it sucks. It was probably a legally correct decision, and at least the California Supreme Court refused to void the marriages already performed. But good lord does it suck. Best of luck to the CA LGBT community on the 2010 election.

Crap commercial

2009-05-05T01:28:00.002-05:00

The "I Married My Dream Girl" commercial from freecreditreport.com is nothing more than "bitch set me up" set to music, and I'd prefer never to see or hear it again. I'm inclined to think any guy who wishes he hadn't gotten married because of his wife's credit score deserves to be shitcanned.

It's Wingnut Boilover Day

2009-04-15T12:51:00.005-05:00

How do we stop the extremists in this country from thinking their opinion is the only one that matters?

Can we prevent the Eric Rudolphs and Timothy McVeighs of this country from bringing back the bad old days of lynchings and Red Scares?

When will the wingnuts stop shitting all over our shared national symbols? First the Minutemen and Michael Savage's laughable Paul Revere Society, now the reduction of one of the great symbols of humanity's right to consent to its government to a juvenile sex joke supporting greedy, ignorant cheapskates' right to be greedy, ignorant cheapskates.

I wore a flag sticker on my backpack for about a year after 9/11. When it became clear that things were returning to business as usual and that the right-wing hawks and lunatics had every intention of appropriating the flag and the symbols of our history for their own purposes, the sticker came off. We of the American Left need to take our symbols back and remind the people who are abusing them that back in the day, they'd probably have been Crown loyalists. Update: Teabaggers at the Hyannis Airport Rotary. I drove by screaming they were a disgrace to the flag and flipping them all the bird. They booed me. Heh. Not concerned. (Well, except for the part where they were causing a traffic jam worthy of August.)

AmazonFail update: I would categorize their response as barely adequate -- they have more or less admitted fault and mostly repaired the problem, but haven't explicitly apologized, nor have they been really clear about what happened. They will be watched, and have already lost a lot of customers to places like Powell's or AbeBooks. At this point, I think it's a judgement call as to whether to boycott or not. I have already made one of the purchases I was planning on making at Amazon at another location and though I will resume doing Vine reviews soon, there's a very good possibility I may do my self-bought reviews here or at Off Season for a while. Which is just as well, as many of my upcoming review choices probably should be at Off Season anyway, if only to get more traffic. Update: see Clay Shirky's analysis of the response to AmazonFail, which I thought was somewhat justified myself but bordered on a witch hunt.

Amazon, WTF?

2009-04-13T14:33:00.003-05:00

Well, if it hasn't reached you yet, it will soon -- hundreds of books on GLBT, teen sexuality, and women's issues vanished from Amazon.com's sales ranking lists over the course of Easter Sunday. The blogosphere has, quite predictably and understandably, shit a brick over this, especially as the problem seems to have been outstanding since February.

Now I do not personally think this was a corporate decision, but Amazon customer reps have been sending out form letters calling it a "glitch" (after an initial round of form letters that would seem to indicate that they had no idea what was going on). They have yet to post anything on the front page, though at least a few people (including me) believe that the system was intentionally trolled during a time when most of Amazon's US staff was probably home for the Easter weekend, and at least one person is claiming responsibility (though his credibility is in grave doubt, based largely on his lack of programming mojo). (There is an ongoing Twitter discussion at #amazonfail.)

Amazon knows this has been a disaster for them; many people have canceled orders, and I myself sent a note saying that I would not only postpone any purchases I'm considering (I had a couple in mind, including the new Michael Ruhlman book and a deck of Spanish playing cards) but that as a Vine reviewer, I won't be submitting any content until it's resolved. I'm willing to grant them a presumption of innocence, but even if they are innocent, they're handling it poorly and deserve to lose massive amounts of money over it.

What I was doing with a deck of cards at a bar last night

2009-03-26T00:24:00.003-05:00

The basic idea: solitaire hold 'em poker. I've been on a bit of a playing card kick lately and the idea of a newish sort of solitaire poker flitted through my head a while back. I'm not too sure of the value of this particular game, but here goes the basic rules I came up with:

Needed:
-1 deck of standard cards, jokers removed
-a handful of counters (I used 5, but 21 might be better)

1. Shuffle deck.
2. Deal out nine cards face down -- two for the player, two for the "house", five common cards.
3. Flip over player cards, then first three common cards. Decide whether to stay in; if not, pass a counter to the "house".
4. Flip over last two cards; stay in or pass counter.
5. Flip over house; winner gets a counter.
6. Player wins best-of-five.

My main concern in something like this is that it actually be sufficiently interesting as to be worth repeat plays. I've already come up with one refinement -- the "21 counters" game, where you start with 21 counters and push one into a pot for each stage of the deal (initial deal, flop, fourth street, river) if you wish to stay in, and pass the pot to the "house" if you don't. In this set, you win if you have over half your original chips after five hands. (Why five hands? 54 cards/9 cards per hand = 6 hands, but since there's no jokers there will be seven cards left at the bottom of the deck before reshuffling.) This particular ruleset can also be trivially converted into a blackjack-like banking game, but I'd bet someone somewhere has already come up with it.

Consider the type-in

2009-02-02T02:21:00.002-05:00

When I was a kid, as most geeks over about the age of 25 will remember, computer magazines often included many, many type-in programs. I never had enough patience to type them in, but the installed base of many of these old programs, many in BASIC, with many games and productivity programs, had to have been huge back in the day. I've been looking (without a whole lot of success) for some of these old programs, but the magazines are hard to find and the books that collected them were usually cheaply-printed paperbacks. Some are floating around on the net (the Wikipedia article links to a few archives), but for the most part, except for the random shell scripts and the like that appear in magazines like MacLife and Linux Journal, the form is dead. (In fact, I do have one such program typed in somewhere, a WarioWare-style minigame from a series of kid's adventure books called Micro Adventures. It is a painfully difficult game under the best of circumstances, and porting it to Chipmunk Basic proved pointless, since there's no way to throttle down the execution speed.)

Now I'm not going to lie -- to a certain extent the form isn't necessary. Certainly the many tedious pages of machine code that marked such programs as SpeedScript (a favorite program of mine when the buffer lag on geoWrite started driving me batty) aren't welcomed anymore. But I still think there's value in the form -- for one thing, programming has passed back into the realm of the Priesthood (aka Eric Raymond's "cathedral"). Most people don't even realize that almost every computer OS comes with at least two programming languages already available by default (usually some sort of shell scripting as well as JavaScript), and almost every high school and college student has had to purchase a TI or HP graphing calculator at some point. And robotics, especially in the form of things like Lego Mindstorms and the iRobot Roomba, has become quite popular as a hobby since NASA's Mars explorations proved that a robot doesn't have to sing and dance to be interesting. (Sadly, kiddie computers like those made by VTech no longer include even basic programming functionality, and out of the major gaming consoles, only Sony even gives lip service towards supporting homebrew development, by allowing Linux on the PS3. Nintendo grudgingly allows it but does not support it, and Microsoft has a history of open hostility.)

All that being as it may, we're actually in pretty good shape as far as facilities are concerned if anyone wishes to bring this sort of magazine or book back on the market. As I said, JavaScript is probably a logical place to begin, as it's standard on all three major web browser engines. TICalc.org shows the amount of work that's done on graphing calculator platforms despite the unabashedly weird syntaxes of RPL and TI-BASIC. And we can't forget the ready availability of languages such as Perl, Python, and Lua (all of which can be readily interfaced to graphic toolkits like Tk), as well as special-purpose languages such as Inform; all of these products are open source software and readily obtained and installed on whatever platform you choose.

So will anyone do this? Although the format would have to change a little (less condensed listings, more comments), it would certainly help to train a new generation of hackers, and for those that don't wish to do the typing it would be trivial to get the pretyped versions. What say you sirs?

Tabloids in the culture wars: What's wrong with AMI?

2009-01-04T19:42:00.002-05:00

You know, I think American Media Inc. has gone too far this time. They've always angled towards a distinctly right-wing audience (although the Weekly World News alone among all their papers discovered the value of not taking itself seriously), but they've gone over the deep end lately.

The Sun and the Enquirer don't seem to have had much to say so far, but the Globe for the last two weeks has been running with the long-discredited meme about Obama not being a native-born American, while the Examiner ran a breathless piece about "gay terrorists" being responsible for torching Sarah Palin's church in Alaska. I'm of two minds about this -- on the one hand, people are conditioned not to take AMI rags all that seriously (the Enquirer, sketchy as it is, is the only one worth a damn journalistically, and that isn't saying much), but on the other hand they have a huge and frequently gullible readership. Asking AMI to practice responsible journalism is perhaps a bit extreme, but at the same time it seems hard to justify printing outright fearmongering and hatred.

I'd suggest boycotting, but unlike my grandmother (who was a regular Enquirer reader, much to the bemusement of my mother), I don't think I've ever actually spent money on one. So I don't know...

The banished words list. Woo-hoo, let's start the year with some language snobbery.

2009-01-01T01:04:00.002-05:00

Lake Superior State's Banished Words List

Oh boy. Yet another opportunity to grouse about words we're kind of tired of hearing and neologisms that we somehow don't think are necessary. Hell, I bet they think they're a bunch of mavericks, like William Safire. Eh, not so much.

On "The Christmas Shoes"

2008-12-24T03:19:00.003-05:00

I had managed to go my entire life until last week never having heard that odious crapfest of a song. Despite my best efforts to avoid its creepy, manipulative, heart-cloggingly schmaltzy lyrics, I've had to hear it twice in the last week. I can only say this:

Take away the lyrics and the Christianity, and this is still an unbelievably shitty piece of late-90s MOR crap, missing only the obligatory gratuitous saxophone stings. If there were no words, this piece of shit song would still make me want to pound crucifixion nails into my ears just listening to the instrumental. It is a perfect shitstorm of crap and should be pulled from the airwaves and every copy microwaved to a sparkly polycarbonate cinder.

For brain bleach (albeit weak), an interesting mediocrity and the bizarre treatment of a well-established alt-music artist: a dance diva who is smoking hot despite having pronounced thighs and no waist to speak of. Also, from a few weeks ago, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon comments on the shafting of Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls by her label for having a supposedly less-than-perfect body. A tale of two record labels it seems.

Where Matt Nisbet fails

2008-11-28T00:31:00.002-05:00

I've been a regular reader of ScienceBlogs for about two years and I've always found Matt Nisbet's Framing Science blog to be something of an oddity on that site. Nisbet and Chris Mooney (of The Republican War On Science fame) have been pushing a concept of science framing that has rubbed a lot of people in the science and skeptical community the wrong way, since it seems to be unrelentingly accommodationist, and tends to prefer subtle ways of undermining people's prejudices. Overall, Mooney (and his blog partner Sheril Kirshenbaum) is actually quite an enjoyable writer, and although I may disagree with his concept of framing he's mostly fairly reasonable. Nisbet, however, is another story.

Nisbet has made quite a few enemies on ScienceBlogs (including PZ Myers, Mike the Mad Biologist, and PalMD), and has even alienated people like Orac who sympathize with his aims but don't like his approach. But now I think he's worn out his welcome, at least in this lurker's eyes; he has tried to make the case that the term "denialist" is a Godwin. Wait, what?

He's completely serious about this -- claims that we shouldn't use it because it lumps in creationists, anthrogenic global warming deniers, germ theory deniers, etc, etc, etc with Holocaust deniers. And he actually quotes people who fall into one or another category of denialism to support this. Mark Hoofnagle at ScienceBlogs' awesome Denialism Blog responds. Hoofnagle's response, as well as his analysis of Nisbet's unrelenting obtuseness and evident incompetence as an expert in communications, is pretty much as you'd expect, and I more or less agree. I posted the following on Nisbet's response to attacks on his position, which seems to be little more than the old conservative canard that amounts to "I may be wrong, but at least I'm more civil than you":

Matt, if there's one thing I've noticed about your work it seems to involve bending and accommodating, defending and (attempted) desensitizing, but it constantly and consistently shies away from going on the attack and trying to reclaim the high ground from the anti-intellectuals and shills who have stolen it. We've seen from the last three US Presidential elections that your strategy tends to fail miserably in politics; the main reason Obama succeeded where Kerry failed had at least as much to do with promoting his message in states where no one expected it to take hold as it did any of the candidate's personal charisma (even though Obama has way more of it than Kerry).

It's as if you're teaching an MBA course and telling your students the importance of turning a profit without explaining how to create income. There are no tools for success in your concept of framing, only those to keep the skeptical side from being marginalized too quickly. (And not only that; you've shown yourself to be terrible at the very communication skills you're trying to convince people to have.)

What was so great about esr, anyway?

2008-11-19T23:08:00.005-05:00

Seriously. I look back on it and realize that my first post here about him aside, really I've only ever lined up with him on one issue, the value of open source software. On that he's pretty sensible, but the man has completely lost his fucking mind, stuck somewhere between libertarian and neocon.

He opposes net neutrality and he's bought into a lot of the right-wing talking points about Obama. The latter is pretty ridiculous; though he doesn't go so far as to buy into the hysteria of Obama's "associations" with terrorism or his alleged religious preferences, he is completely sold on the whole ACORN lie. But the net neutrality thing -- that's a headscratcher from a practical standpoint. To him it makes sense -- he proposes working around the current internet situation with things such as white space and mesh networking. Uh...

Well, there's more to it than those two, but think about just those items. White space networking does not even exist yet in any meaningful sense; IEEE 802.22 has existed for four years and I had never heard of it until just now looking up the Wikipedia article above. As for mesh networking, well... it's a nice thing overall, and an important part of the OLPC initiative, but when you get right down to it, mesh networking is little more than a hardware-level elaboration on UUCP. Store-and-forward (even if it's almost realtime) is, by its very nature, ad hoc, and -- here's the kicker -- it still has to go out to the public network somehow. You can't route around it, simply because that's where all the content is. White space is fine as well -- I can think of at least a few good uses -- but the very agency that is making the white space initiative possible, the FCC, is one of the agencies that libertarians like Raymond want to get rid of.

I don't know what kind of world libertarians think they're out to create, but Raymond's idea of dealing with a lack of net neutrality regulations really seems to eventually lead to the same sort of corporatist, quasi-feudalistic society that every other libertarian plan seems to. (For that matter, I'm not sure which is worse -- if most libertarians don't realize this, or if they do.) I do know that there is one hell of a lot of rank dishonesty in the anti-net neutrality crowd (comparing it with the fairness doctrine? what the hell?!), but I'm inclined to think that people who take a stand like Raymond's -- principled, but completely and absolutely bonkers (not to mention breathtakingly ignorant for someone who has for years sought but never quite attained the status of alpha hacker except as a historian of the field) -- do more good for the pro-neutrality side by coming to conclusions that make no sense except in light of their fringe politics.

White space networking will be great. (And I'm hoping for some 4m amateur radio as well.) Mesh networking isn't too shabby either. But let's not kid ourselves -- a future of tiered public net service and a cluster of second-class users skulking around on darknets isn't the connectivity DARPA was hoping for when they opened the net to all comers.

Eight years redux

2008-11-07T03:07:00.002-05:00

In the world of the blogosphere, there's usually someone better-spoken and more popular who probably said what you intended to say better than you did.

The Rude Pundit, in this case, is that person.

The day after

2008-11-05T19:44:00.002-05:00

A few things:

The John McCain we all thought we knew returned for the concession speech last night. Unfortunately, his thuggish supporters showed up too. Was that disgust on McCain's face as he tried to quiet the boos from a crowd it had been obvious for weeks that he didn't like? I honestly can't say -- I'm a terrible judge of expressions. But let's hope this is a rebirth of the post-Keating McCain of 2000, where even Democrats were impressed with him. He was a better man then, and he can be again.
I'm done with Caribou Barbie. If we're lucky she'll go back to sportscasting. Unfortunately, I fear she'll replace Ann Coulter as the figurehead of the anti-feminist female Right. Fortunately, with the generational shift away from religious fanaticism, it may be a few years until we have to take the extreme Right seriously again.
President Obama will have a long, long laundry list of things to deal with. Let's hope community issues like effective affordable health care (preferably to both the people and the government, nothing like that enormous hematoma that is Medicaid), veteran's benefits, labor rights, and discrimination issues get a chance to take center stage. (If he can do all this and do it on the post-Wall Street bailout shoestring he'll be stuck with, he will be the greatest president ever. That might be aiming a little high.) After that, there's a massive amount of other things that need to be done. But that's where he ought to start.
Obama is one skinny bastard under that suit. Just sayin'.
I mentioned community issues above. In practice, community often means urban, and we've placed far too much focus on a nonexistent ideal of small town America. That needs to go away -- our cities are in dire need of help, and I'm tired of people from the sticks saying that the cities aren't worth saving. But that goes both ways -- methamphetamine, for example, is the public health scourge of small town America, so while we're putting money into the cities, we can't forget how much poverty, violence, and drug use our countrysides see as well.
President Medvedev delivered a scorching address attacking US foreign policy today. While some of the decay of US-Russian relations has to do with Vladimir Putin's rolling back of the clock on Russian democracy, the bulk of it is George Bush's fault. That's a relationship that both Obama and Medvedev are going to have to work hard on repairing.

Well, time to get this show on the road. It's not over; it's just beginning.

Eight years in the making

2008-11-04T23:09:00.002-05:00

To the hatemongering wingnuts who have spent the last fourteen years polluting the media with hate and bullshit economics...

To the sniveling rat bastards who forwarded every nasty email you got about liberals you've ever heard...

To every last goddamned one of you who try to force religion down our throats in the voting booth, in the classroom, in the courtroom, and every other public space you've been constitutionally barred from since the passage of the First Amendment...

To those willfully ignorant people who can't comprehend the value of science done for its own sake, science done for no reason other than to see where it leads...

To the rich scumsuckers who funded the Clinton witchhunt while finding ways to kick unions when they're down and screw your workers ever more and more while your allies in Washington cleared out all the barriers...

To the neocons who somehow thought Pinky and the Brain were valid models for foreign policy...

FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU ALL IN YOUR FUCKING ASSES WITH SHARKSKIN CONDOMS AND NO LUBE WHATSOEVER. FUCK YOU UNTIL YOU FUCKING BLEED AND YOU'RE ON COLOSTOMY BAGS FOR THE REST OF YOUR SORRY ASS LIVES.

It's our turn. We're watching your violent psychos and zealots to make sure they crawl back into the caves where they belong. We're putting the US back on the map.

We're done with you. Time to bring the US into the 21st century.

If I trusted the voting machines, I'd have the popcorn out

2008-10-26T03:10:00.002-05:00

So it seems McCain staffers think Sarah Palin has gone rogue. if the rumors coming from places like CNN are true, Palin's straying embarrassingly far off message; she's certainly enabled any number of obnoxious racists and religious zealots (personal to F.B.I. in Quantico: you really need to keep a close eye on these people in case of an Obama win -- they're angry, stupid, and heavily armed), and the Republican party seems to be on the verge of tearing itself apart. (For whatever it's worth, I predicted -- well, call it an edjucated guess, "predict" is such a pretentious term -- a number of years ago that when the shit hit the fan, the neocons, the palaeocons, and the religious Right would claw each other's eyes out and tear the GOP to shreds, probably around 2010. They certainly seem on track to make that time frame.)

In a reasonably rational world, the fact that the entire structure of conservative free market economics has come crashing down and that US social policy threatens to make us look like savages in the eyes of the rest of the Westernized world would be putting an end to current Republican policies. The fact that the US has just been quite abruptly switched over to a duct-tape-and-chewing-gum version of a socialist economy tells us that we've got an awful lot of rebuilding and remodeling to do, and an Obama presidency with a Democratic congress might just put us on that route. I can only say we can hope, but we shouldn't hold our breath; after all, November 4th is still a week and a half away.

Say it

2008-10-19T22:45:00.003-05:00

A few years ago, the nostalgia site RetroCRUSH published a list of the 50 Coolest Song Parts. I'd like to add one.

I've found myself weirdly fascinated with the Ben Folds/Regina Spektor song "You Don't Know Me". In some ways it seems to go back over and mine the territory Neil Diamond and Barbara Streisand marked out thirty years ago with "You Don't Bring Me Flowers"; it is, as any Folds production is, impeccably produced, with a bouncy tune juxtaposed with harsh dump-song lyrics. It doesn't live up to its potential though -- while "Flowers" almost seamlessly converted from a solo to a duet, with really only a few rough spots that Diamond should have rewritten, Folds uses Spektor mostly as a backup singer, which, though I'm not too familiar with Spektor's work, seems to be a huge waste. It's a big whack of points off of what should be an awesome song.

Anyway, Spektor steps into character as the jilted lover precisely once in the song, for two lines at the end. Having sat through an unrelenting tirade from her soon-to-be-ex, the woman finally steps up, first with an impatient "What?", then with a cracking, devastated, but utterly defiant "Say it!"

Bam. Kick to the fucking nuts.

There is no place left to go. The man ends with a noncommittal justification for refusing to proceed further, and the song fades. Good stuff.

Thoughts I wish I wasn't having

2008-10-17T01:10:00.002-05:00

-Obama does not yet have this one in the bag. The ACORN thing will be beaten to death over the next two and a half weeks, and I'd bet money that despite what I've read to the contrary about ACORN being a pretty good watchdog when it comes to vote fraud, absolutely no one to the right of Obama himself will believe it.

-Given the sheer white-hot hatred coming from The Base (TM), the Democratic Congress better do way better in the next session than it did in this one or there will be a frivolous impeachment in President Obama's future.

-McCain likely has absolutely no political capital left. After that debate performance, only The Base (TM) can possibly take him seriously. That doesn't mean, however, that a massive, completely spurious, devastatingly effective propaganda blitz can't still happen. It really depends on whether McCain finds a white knight in the former "VRWC" crowd. One can only hope that whoever's coming up in Richard Mellon Scaife's disgraced shoes has as little faith in McCain as the broader fundraising base seems to.

-I don't care if Joe the Plumber is an actual plumber, or if he's really related to Charles Keating, or what. He's a dimwit who can't think past the end of his own paycheck, and is likely up for a massive IRS audit this year after what's come out about his tax bill. And if I had to guess, he's probably a Paultard.

-I hope at least a few of President Clinton's personal Secret Service detail are still on the job. Obama's going to need them. I swear, Slick Willie must have handpicked his detail from the special forces considering someone actually tried to drop a plane on him.

-I have heard people saying that they hope the government means it that they'll eventually cash out of the banks they're buying into. Fuck that. Socialism = Sweden as far as I'm concerned, and I want the Fed to be able to whack financial misconduct right where it hurts the most -- in the boardroom.

Down the stretch or down in flames?

2008-10-16T01:05:00.002-05:00

Well, we'll see. I have to be brutally honest -- I'm not completely on the Obama train (I originally wanted Edwards), but when I look at the alternatives -- irrelvance or John McCain... well, he can't be any worse, right? After all, McCain at least came off as coherent, but to those who watched the debate on TV, he seemed dismissive and disrespectful, and evidently at times about ready to jump podiums and rip Obama's throat out. In addition, his responses on abortion rights (what "extreme" wing of the "pro-abortion" movement? Most pro-choicers actually like kids...) and public schooling (vouchers, aka the Great Private School Money Siphon; HeadStart is a great program, but we need to reform it (?!)) either ran against the grain of American life or just plain made no sense at all.

Truthfully, I like the way Obama came off in the debate tonight -- deliberative, a bit of a policy wonk in the Clinton mode, even-handed and unwilling to allow himself to be baited; compare to McCain, who was polished but stuck too close to his talking points. If this is the sort of president Obama might be, this might work out pretty well. And I would love to see racist assholes lose their shit when "I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear..." goes out over the airwaves. But there's still two weeks left. No chicken counting just yet.

What's clear is that McCain has self-destructed -- picking the ridiculous and pathetic Sarah Palin as a running mate, pushing conservative policies at a time when many Americans are starting to become suspicious of Bush's holes in the church-state wall, grandstanding on economic issues in the midst of a meltdown that's utterly devastated the intellectual case for conservative/libertarian fiscal policy. He's surrounded himself with the Republican base and discovered he doesn't really like them, especially since a large contingent of them are hoping he'll kick the bucket and leave Palin in charge. (Bad news, holy rollers: barring a melanoma recurrence, McCain has longevity in his genes.) He could come back. But someone could also find the Skinner constant in Kip Thorne's FTL travel equations when the Large Hadron Collider starts up and we could have a manned mission to Gliese 581 by 2020. (Okay, that's slightly less likely. But you get the idea.)

What's clear: there is a damn good chance the US will have its first president of African-American descent. (BTW, anyone find his recent commercial showing his family on his mother's side a little overcompensatory? Admittedly it's probably necessary in all the states where people think he's a Muslim, but it just looks strange in Massachusetts, which is pretty much a safe Obama state either way.) If it doesn't... well, I'll put this diplomatically. No one outside the US wants McCain to win, because they associate him with Bush 43. Despite McCain's protestations tonight in the debate that he isn't Bush 43, he's done a piss poor job of distinguishing himself.

America gonef

2008-10-03T00:58:00.002-05:00

Okay, so Biden didn't shred Palin the way everyone was expecting, and she somehow managed to avoid sounding like the gibbering idiot she came across as with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson. But has George W. Bush really lowered the bar for GOP candidates so low that this debate could possibly be called a draw?

I'll start by saying both candidates had a problem with evasiveness. But there was one key difference between the two of them -- Biden was cogent and quick on the draw with information that could be easily verified with a quick Google search. Palin, on the other hand, fought like mad to stay on message whether it was relevant or not and showed little obvious ability to think on her feet, resorting to trite sloganeering so often that it was unclear whether she had any original thought at all. Biden actually came across as somewhat flummoxed, like someone who'd just realized that the person he'd been attempting to have a discussion about basic particle physics was actually a cat. I'll give the punditocracy the idea that Palin in some sense "held her own" -- that is, she didn't make herself look like a bigger ditz than she has already. But she didn't exactly raise the bar either -- her responses were bordering on content-free, and she seems to have no feel at all for appropriate speech registers. I mean, that was all George W. Bush had to do in his debates, and look where we are now.

Only the most dishonest or desperate of party hacks could consider this a win for Palin. But what amazes me is that this could be considered even a draw -- I mean, how does that work? This isn't bowling or horse racing where you can spot a less experienced opponent some handicap points. Somewhere on the Senate floor, Hillary Clinton is glad she endorsed Obama.

McCain is a coward

2008-09-25T01:09:00.002-05:00

So McCain, being revealed at long last as a coward, has attempted to back out of this week's presidential debate, and he's getting hammered in the opinion polls for it. An evident attempt to take the moral high ground on the current financial meltdown has instead made McCain look like a coward, and he's even threatening to pull Palin out of the VP debate. On top of all that, he blew off David Letterman, pissing him off mightily; considering that ever since the 1992 elections, pissing off the late night talk show hosts has been a very bad idea, it certainly makes McCain look like a coward.

I think I want to googlebomb this. McCain is a coward.

Palin's true colors

2008-09-05T13:43:00.002-05:00

Well, Sarah Palin's true nature has become quite clear with almost embarrassing speed. Despite coming off as window dressing from the beginning, she's proven one thing -- she's a skilled propagandist, and a rather obnoxiously autocratic one at that. Trying to get the Wasilla head librarian fired for not bending on a censorship issue? Trying to get someone fired because he wouldn't fire her sister's ex-husband? This is a woman who has little concept of separation of powers. In that regard, she actually reminds me a lot of ex-gov Mitt Romney, who also had a nasty habit of trying to do things that he wasn't constitutionally allowed to do. So I already don't like her. (The fact that I happen to personally know someone who is a Wasilla resident who outright hates her doesn't really have much bearing on that.) You don't have to be a sexist pig to find things to criticize her for.

And now, the "community organizer" smear. Mike the Mad Biologist over at scienceblogs.com points out that her sneering use of the term "community organizers" is really a pitch-perfect example of dogwhistle politics -- to a liberal, a part of the political spectrum where community activism is integral to the process of policymaking, this is a somewhat incomprehensible sneer -- after all, community activists are the people on the ground in poor neighborhoods, making sure people can show up to vote, can afford the high costs of energy and housing, have a venue to tell their stories, and even just put food on the table. Community activists are like the neighborhood equivalent of trade unions, providing bargaining power to the disenfranchised at city hall and the state capitol the same way that unions are supposed to with corporate management.

But that's not the image Palin is trying to invoke in the minds of prospective GOP voters. The Right has long been enamored of the narrative of rugged individualism, and has cultivated the model of a class society where if you're not on top, you probably don't deserve to be; after all, we can all achieve any station in life we want, right? In addition -- a point that underlies Mike's post -- the ugly fact is that the GOP was known early on to be trying to find ways to sneak veiled racism past voters in case of an Obama primary victory. They've already done it at least once by accusing Obama of racism by making a preemptive strike a few weeks ago against that very tactic ("You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.") and Mike makes a pretty good case that this, likewise, is a racist swipe at a class of people that the Right generally associates with such exemplars of self-parody as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Now it may not be inherently racist (though I doubt it), but it is definitely classist. This speaks straight to American Right's mantra of self-reliance and, racist or not, plays off the image of lower-class communities as crime-ridden cesspools of stupidity and laziness and of community activists as willing enablers of such squalor. Palin's "community organizers" aren't building houses, negotiating cheaper oil, or subsidizing rent checks; they're enabling freeloaders and retards to get something for nothing. To the very richest Republicans, this message goes even deeper: it says that rather than trying to bring the downtrodden up out of need, they're trying to tear down the successful out of jealousy.

I have to be honest. I'm not too optimistic about Obama's chances this fall; though Andy Tanenbaum at electoral-vote.com currently has Obama leading in the tracking polls with just over 300 electoral votes, we live in a time where, thanks to the shamelessness and propaganda expertise of people such as Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist, our national political conversation has combined the fear-mongering of early 20th century politics with Richard Hofstadter's Paranoid Style to create a situation where, for the time being, progressive politics can make only minor gains and has to fight on a daily basis to keep what it has gained in the last 40 years. But I'm still voting Obama, because I have no other viable choice. With any luck, the swipe against "community organizers" will backfire the way Bob Dole's attacks on teachers' unions in 1996 did. Maybe it will too.

Welcome to the show, Gov. Palin

2008-08-29T11:37:00.001-05:00

And remember: Feminism means never having to say "go easy on me; I'm a girl."

Biden's gonna eat her alive.

I hope Bill Amend is okay with this. I couldn't care less about Bil Keane.

2008-08-01T01:24:00.002-05:00

I know the webcomic PvP and its author Scott Kurtz are the subjects of many heated debates and passionate feelings. He's certainly a talented comic artist, but there seems to be little neutral ground when it comes to Kurtz and his work -- some think he's an iconoclast as well as an icon for mainstreaming webcomics, some (this would be me) simply enjoy his work and try to stay above the fray, and some find Kurtz to be an insatiable attention whore and his comic to be garbage. I don't think there's a whole lot of middle ground.

I personally enjoy it -- it's a regular on my webcomic reading list. It isn't the greatest ever -- Kurtz has a rather ad hoc attitude towards character development (for example, I've never really understood his reversion of Marcie to a younger character design, and welcome the return of a more realistic-looking Marcie in the wake of the Brent/Jade wedding arc). But it's certainly held my attention far longer than User Friendly, which is still modestly enjoyable but painfully anachronistic and repetitive (honestly, story and character development came to a halt after Pitr and Pearl met). But Kurtz does love to throw a bomb from time to time, and this one went off like a MOAB in an LP tank farm. (Let's just say the denouement is simultaneously one of the funniest and most vicious uses of media parody I've ever seen, even compared to the end of the first Scooby-Doo movie.)

I'm probably reading far too much into what is really just a slash-and-burn attack on a very monotonous and overly sweet family comic (Family Circus has nothing on For Better or for Worse, which is hardly an exemplar of greatness itself), but it seems to me to be an interesting comment on decorum. We move through life and often cover the more unpleasant sides of ourselves with polite fictions. This is fine; it keeps the wheels greased. But the darker side is when "decorum" becomes a mask covering serious dysfunction, abuse, or outright insanity; this sort of decorum is what made comics like George Carlin and Richard Pryor so controversial, because they saw through it for the bullshit that it was. Even if Keane is nothing like Kurtz makes him out to be, there is still the point to be made that trying to maintain these fictions so that the maintainer doesn't have to face reality is precisely the point of insipid garbage like this.

I leave you with a paraphrase from the 1990s MTV cartoon Daria -- when a classmate of Jane and Daria's dies, it is pointed out (I don't remember by who) that the phrase "it really makes you think" implies that thinking is uncomfortable and an impedance to our daily lives. That observation, in a nutshell, is the biggest problem of dogmatism, and explains why I've thrown in my lot with the skeptics of the world. Maybe none of this was Kurtz' intent, but it does make me think, and frankly, I don't mind that.

It is finished

2008-07-24T14:17:00.002-05:00

PZ Myers went and did it, and in exactly the ignominious and anticlimactic fashion it deserved to be done. Not that it will make any impact at all on the Catholic Church, but it gets the message across: nothing is sacred in any meaningful way.

I want a banana now. Unfortunately, I don't have any, so I may settle for a cup of coffee.

A line in the sand on altmed

2008-07-23T12:53:00.002-05:00

Resistance is not futile, but it certainly feels like pissing up a flagpole sometimes.

I'm disgusted by the concept of health freedom (disclaimer: I wrote most of that article). It really is an epic disaster -- quacks and self-deluded people insisting on unfettered access, free of criticism, to patients and doctors, and invoking happyfuzzy words like "freedom" to justify it. I once tried to warn a fellow customer at a bookstore away from a Kevin Trudeau book, only to receive a response that she believed in "alternative healing". Fluoridation was voted down by a landslide in my home town because the fluoride fearmongers got more hearts and minds than the dentists (you know, the people who are actually experts on the subject). And vaccination rates world wide are dropping as the paranoid claim links with autism, infertility, genocide, and other spurious accusations.

I'm going to put a few links at the bottom of this post that have a lot to do with the stupidity that seems to be eating us alive. It causes the rationalists of the world great despair, and this is all I can offer to help change things:

Quackwatch.org -- Stephen Barrett's uber-site of anti-quackery, and the hub of a growing network of skeptical sites, most of which revolve around medicine. One of the oldest, and best, and an absolute must-read -- the Snopes.com of altmed.
Respectful Insolence, Aetiology, ERV, and Denialism Blog -- some of my favorite anti-altie sites on scienceblogs.com. Orac is a surgical oncologist, Tara Smith is a professor of epidemiology, Abbie Smith is an HIV researcher, and the authors of Denialism Blog are a med student, a lawyer, and a practicing medical doctor who all fight the good fight against teh st00pid.
In The Pipeline -- In the same vein as the ScienceBlogs crew, pharma chemist Derek Lowe (not the ex-Red Sox pitcher) writes about the real world of pharma chem, in which things are not quite as evil as the alties make out (though Pfizer in particular takes a beating in Lowe's estimation, he still takes great pride in his work and other scientists in the industry).
RationalWiki.com -- originally created as a response to the dysfunctional propaganda factory at Conservapedia, I've been involved on RationalWiki for quite some time and am one of a great many users (including PalMD from the above-mentioned Denialism Blog) who have been trying to make a humorous but authoritative reference for woo fighters.
The Millenium Project -- Created by Peter Bowditch from Australia, this site focuses heavily on anti-vaxers and faith healers, as well as attempts to profit from peoples' gullibility.
Don't forget more general skeptical websites such as the James Randi Educational Foundation, Robert Todd Carroll's Skeptic's Dictionary, snopes.com, and many, many others.

I'm hoping to make some PSAs in the near future to put on YouTube so people can put them on local public access cable channels. In the meantime, consider these essential reading.

What's TI got in the calculator pipeline?

2008-06-30T20:10:00.003-05:00

The TI-30Xa and TI-36X Solar appear to be in clearance mode at many of the retailers that are carrying them. Allow me to make baseless speculations about why.

The TI-30 eco RS could be coming stateside, perhaps in a package to match the TI-30XS MultiView. I've never really understood why they phased out the solar panel on the Xa in the States to begin with.
TI-36 eco RS? It'd be a logical next step. Maybe with a somewhat less flashy packaging?
TI-36 MultiView. I doubt they'd do much to promote it though -- they've only sporadically pushed the TI-30 version, and the TI-34 version is too new. It might wind up being a TI-only purchase like the current TI-36XII.

I have a better idea, TI: try making your designs just a wee bit less expensive? You're getting your ass kicked on the low end by anklebiters like Karce. And please please please don't bring anything that looks like the TI-30XB stateside. That thing is fugly.

McCain, you've got to be kidding me

2008-06-30T11:42:00.002-05:00

Let's pretend for a moment that John McCain hasn't frittered away all the goodwill he built up on the opposite side of the aisle from the 2000 election. Let me get this straight: oil is over $140 a barrel, and airlines are using the outrageous price of jet fuel as an excuse to nickel and dime customers to death, and McCain is chartering a plane called the Straight Talk Express?

$140 a barrel. Green is big. Nobody believes McCain is a straight talker anymore. AND HE'S CHARTERING A PRIVATE CAMPAIGN PLANE.

Has he completely lost his mind?

Obama in '08. He's the least worst.

Musings on redistricting, part 1

2008-05-30T14:25:00.006-05:00

In a recent article in the Boston Phoenix, writer David Bernstein pointed out that Massachusetts faces three possible political upheavals in the very near future -- the likely loss of Ted Kennedy because of his recent cancer diagnosis, the distinct possibility of John Kerry receiving a post in an Obama cabinet, and the likelihood of Massachusetts losing yet another congressional district after the 2010 census. It's worth noting that Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, way back in the colonial days, was the man responsible for creating the infamous "Gerrymander" district in Essex County. In the next few posts I'm going to offer a few thoughts on removing the politics from congressional representation. I'm going to start with a rough breakdown on some of the major areas in Massachusetts, and a few choice comments on the relevance of the current county divisions.

The reason I'm making this list is as background. Massachusetts, like its capital Boston, is divided into a number of "neighborhoods" that have their own cohesive regional identities, many of which carve up towns so that someone living in one part of, say, Boston will have a different congressman than another part. I live in Bill Delahunt's district, which stretches from Quincy to Provincetown. The logic of this district somewhat escapes me, as frankly the South Shore and the Cape have very little in common. The South Shore is relatively affluent and mostly serves as bedroom communities for Boston and Cambridge; the Cape is geographically isolated, with a wildly variable seasonal population and an economy almost solely based on service industries. While Bourne, Plymouth, and Wareham tend to be rather transitional between the two regions, they have a somewhat different identity to themselves. How these two areas relate when the only thing they have in common is lots of beach land escapes me. So let's begin.

Metro Boston and the inner suburbs. Major communities: Boston, Newton, Cambridge, Somerville, Waltham. The capital of the state, and one of the few urban areas in the state that doesn't suffer from chronic and pervasive economic depression. Out of the last five governors, three of them have been from this area (Weld, Cambridge; Romney, Belmont, Patrick, Milton). The area is particularly known for its educational opportunities, as well as the high-tech industries along the Route 128 corridor and the biotech companies based in Boston and Cambridge.
Cape Cod and the Islands. Formerly very rural, over the 20th century the Cape and Islands became a fairly populous exurban area with a huge seasonal population change and a very strong dependence on tourism and medical-oriented service jobs. The Cape is one of the more conservative areas of the state (I've often called it "Blue Massachusetts' Magenta Tail") and as such is politically very unlike Massachusetts as a whole; the entire area suffers from widespread income disparities and, lacking even a four-year college or significant industry outside service sectors, few opportunities for young adults entering or leaving college and setting out into the world.
South Coast. Major communities: Fall River, New Bedford, and arguably Attleboro, Middleboro, and Taunton. During the whaling era, this was the richest part of the state, but this area is now mostly known as a somewhat depressed, blue collar/industrial area. The Massachusetts cranberry industry is centered here, mostly in Plymouth, Carver, and Wareham, with significant numbers of growers on Cape Cod as well.
South Shore. Major communities: Plymouth, Quincy, Marshfield, Weymouth, Braintree. A relatively affluent area that is mostly a mix of suburban and rural.
North Shore. Major communities: Saugus, Chelsea, Newburyport, Salem, Peabody, Gloucester. Generally thought of as working class, though the areas from Cape Ann north to the New Hampshire border are often quite affluent.
Merrimack Valley. Major communities: Lowell, Lawrence, Methuen, Haverhill. Once a major industrial area, the Merrimack Valley has struggled to reinvent itself after all the mills closed, and Lawrence in particular is notoriously poor and rough. A very large immigrant population, mostly Caribbean Hispanic and southeast Asian.
Metro West. Major communities: Depends on who you talk to, but Natick and Framingham are pretty universally agreed to be among the most important, along with places like Wellesley and Weston. Essentially defined as "somewhere between Newton and Worcester", Metro West is a mix of poor and wealthy with a lot of commercial activity concentrated around Route 9, with a large Brazilian immigrant population. The Hudson/Franklin/Hopkinton area is the fastest-growing area in the state in terms of population.
Worcester and surrounding area: Worcester is far from the wealthiest place in the state, but it vies with Providence for the second largest city in New England, and has quite a lot of civic pride as Eastern Massachusetts' second city. Like Boston, Worcester is very much a college town.
Central and Northern Worcester county: Worcester county is the largest county in Massachusetts in terms of land area, and the central and northern areas are largely rural, with the largest population center in the area being Fitchburg.
Pioneer Valley: This part of Central Massachusetts includes the Connecticut River and the college towns of Amherst and Northampton as well as the Metro Springfield area. Much of it is rural in character, but the Metro Springfield area is heavily urbanized and in fact blends into the Hartford and New Haven metro areas to the south. Springfield itself is considered something of a synonym (along with Lawrence) for urban decay in Massachusetts.
The Berkshires: Like the Cape and Islands, Berkshire County has its own regional identity somewhat separate from the state (indeed, many of the television and radio stations in this area are considered part of the Albany, NY market). The Berkshires are also a rather touristy area, strongly associated with the arts (most notably Norman Rockwell and, on Thanksgiving, Arlo Guthrie), and often have very little to do with Boston at all.

In the next post, I'll try to sift through some of this information and see how it meshes with the current congressional districts in the state.

New Chick Tract... "oy vey" doesn't begin to cover it

2008-05-02T19:41:00.002-05:00

Moving On Up

Jack Chick has, apparently, enthusiastically endorsed the "Evolution->Hitler" meme that the cdesign proponentsists have been using since Expelled came out. I'm not really that surprised, but what's amusing is that as laughable as Chick's tracts have already been, this thing is as insulting to the choir as the people it's trying to convert.

Sic semper... something

2008-02-19T21:21:00.000-05:00

And so HD-DVD has passed on, ceased to be, it is an ex-format, yada yada. Toshiba threw in the towel after fighting a losing battle against Blu-Ray, a battle for a very small slice of the market. Because let's face it -- the HD market is not that big. An awful lot of people can't afford HDTVs yet, and resent the impression that they're having it forced on them by the analog shutdown next year. (It isn't, but the FCC has done a piss-poor job of getting the word out, and the converter boxes currently on the market are outrageously priced even with the subsidized discount.)

It's not that I'm terribly comfortable with Blu-Ray -- the DRM on the format is particularly nasty and paranoid, and though nobody has actually put it into use just yet, the possibility that you could have your player bricked because of a firmware update you didn't know about is really inexcusable. But Blu-Ray has some big upsides. The disc format, for one thing, is more robust than DVD, with mandatory scratchproofing to protect the recording surface. The capacity of the disc is 10GB greater for a single-sided disc, and the recording equipment is more readily available (BD-R burners are not easily found, but HD-DVD burners are damn near impossible). More companies have been shipping Blu-Ray -- in Best Buy a couple of weeks ago, I saw Blu-Ray from five companies (Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Samsung (first to market around here) and LG) and HD-DVD from just two (Toshiba and LG (who was hedging their bets with a two-way player anyway)). Not to mention the way the video game market handled it -- Microsoft offers HD-DVD for the Xbox360, but only as an add-on, while Sony went all-in with the PS3. (Nintendo won by bypassing HD entirely for the Wii and focusing on gameplay -- smart move there.) And most Blu-Ray players seem to be able to handle AVCHD, a godsend to anyone wanting to distribute homemade HD content, since BD-R blanks are still outrageously expensive and DVDs are filthy cheap.

I have heard a great many people saying that it's all moot as we'll all be downloading our video in a few years anyway. Well, maybe those people will -- I've no doubt it's a workable business model. But I don't like being at the mercy of someone else's DRM server to watch a movie whenever I want. As videotape did not kill the movie industry, as the World Wide Web and ebooks have not killed paper books, so downloading will not kill the disc. They play to different market segments, and it's really foolish to pretend otherwise. (It reminds me of Microsoft's house concept that I saw on some newsmagazine (probably Dateline NBC) a few years back -- it was full of interesting gadgets that nobody but a hardcore wirehead could really appreciate. I'm not saying there aren't people who will appreciate it, but at the same time there's a whole hell of a lot of people who just don't see the point.)

Apple: why I am still a fan but no longer a fanboy

2008-01-19T19:59:00.000-05:00

There are times when I wonder whether Steve Jobs' leadership is really a good thing, long-term, for Apple. The MacBook Air happens to be my latest cause for bafflement.

Hey, it's not a bad computer, per se. It's very light and elegant, and certainly will look good when you whip it out in a cafe or on an airplane. And the idea of focusing almost exclusively on wireless networking is not a bad one, though I don't really want to be forced onto wireless (attention TJ Maxx shoppers). But I have never seen Apple ship something like this -- a total slap to 24 years worth of Apple power users. It's the underpowered junkheap in a nice case that the Mac development team went behind Steve's back to avoid shipping back in 1984.

Why am I paying $100 extra for the privilege of a DVD drive? Where is my FireWire connector so I can edit video? (And don't tell me to switch to AVCHD -- iMovie 8 is awful, group-of-pictures codecs are evil, and I don't have a venue for HD productions anyway.) And please, do not tell me that maybe the MacBook Air just isn't for me. Apple may have a tremendous amount of cachet, but they're still a niche player, and they don't have room in their product grid to create something that delivers new features but caters only to a certain section of their market.

Apple produces great hardware and great software. I've always thought that, even as the quality has slipped some in recent years. But that only gets you so far with those who actually know what they want -- I don't like being told that what I get is enough for me. (After all, there's a reason Macs ship with development tools -- as MacOS X is a Unix system, it would have a big credibility problem without them.) Unlike Windows, which is layer upon layer of designed-by-committee cruft, MacOS retains a fair amount of elegance. And I do want a MacBook -- a regular one, not the Air -- for my next computer. But after that, all bets are off -- I'm not averse to getting a PC laptop and installing Linux on it. The tools I need may be more baroque and less consistent on Linux, but they are there, and they do work for what I need. Don't drive your power users away, Apple. You need us as much as or more than you need the Brookstone crowd. (After all, who else was out there touting Applescript as a vast improvement over batch files a decade ago, or laughing at people because plug-and-play Nubus, PCI, and ADB peripherals meant that the control DOS users bragged about having was nothing more than the ability to repair grave defects inherent in the system?)

You're a sellout, man!

2008-01-12T12:12:00.000-05:00

I got the '08 catalog from Ramsey Electronics, and I must say, I'm a little disappointed.

Ramsey has always had the reputation for selling interesting and slightly sketchy electronics kits, and among other things has long been one of the suppliers of choice for American radio pirates (even earning themselves a raid from the FCC a number of years back). That stuff is still in there (though an old joke about one of their products, a robotic bug, is no longer in the catalog), and the catalog is actually quite a bit thicker than last year's. But, interestingly, not with more kits.

No, the big addition has been in the pro audio section. Lots of cool stuff -- high-end, rackmount CD and MP3 players, advanced recording equipment, even a full-on 24-track digital audio workstation for $800. It's all very impressive... and seems to have little or nothing to do with their traditional business.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I'm of a mixed mind regarding pirate radio to begin with; while I do support the need for low-power community radio, there are technical and political issues involved (FM Capture effect, inadequate sideband filtering on home-built gear, religious broadcasting spectrum grabs crowding out other broadcasters) that make an unregulated radio spectrum impossible. And anyone who's ever driven down the street while running an FM transmitter from an MP3 player or satellite radio knows what it's like when a transmitter from a nearby car scrambles your signal. And it's not as if that market is getting slighted -- they don't seem to have actually removed anything from the catalog.

But I do wonder if this is a symptom of the same problem as amateur chemists have -- in the interest of avoiding trouble with the DEA and the DHS, science supply companies have moved over the years to restrict the sale of chemicals and even glassware to those who don't work in scientific fields. Maybe Ramsey is doing something of the same thing -- as the government and hypersensitive litigators continue to try to chip away at freedom of speech, and as the FCC continues to allow large broadcasters such as Clear Channel, Salem, and Infinity to gulp up larger and larger quantities of broadcast spectrum, maybe Ramsey is paving the way for a shift in focus so they don't get raided again. It's pretty sad, especially as most of the new gear, impressive though it may be, is generally out of the cost range of the hobbyists they've catered to over the years.

It's pretty sad when corporate influence and scaremongering raise the barrier to entry on a mere hobby.

Church shootings in Colorado

2007-12-10T03:17:00.000-05:00

Not one, but two church shootings in Colorado on Sunday, including one at Ted Haggard's old church. Now I am no fan of religion, and I think megachurches are a blight on the landscape and lives of Americans. But there is no justification at all for violence like this, no matter who deals it, no matter who the target is. Though I have no prayers to offer, I give my sincerest condolences and best wishes to the families and fellow churchgoers affected by these atrocities. There is probably not a Godless person in this country, at least not one in his/her right mind, who is rejoicing at this, no matter what paranoia some preachers like to spread, and given the senselessness of the murders, no political point to be made here, save one.

One nation, indivisible.

Ode upon a calculator

2007-11-12T00:13:00.000-05:00

Okay, no poetry. But I've had for a few weeks now a TI-30XS and I would like to make a few comments -- on the calculator itself in this post, and then later some thoughts I have on the dominance of TI gear in the educational calculator market.

As calculators go, I'm decently impressed with it. The appearance shows TI's usual flair for design, with a white and slate-blue case with neon green accents, making it stylish but not childish like, say, the TI-108. The interface is almost identical to the one that TI has been using for years in its low to mid-range graphing calculators going back at least to the TI-81 -- you turn it on, you get a cursor instead of a simple number display. If you wish to use it as such, it's quite easy to do so, but the new thing the XS brings to the party is the MathView mode, in which you can, with a bit of practice, enter the problem exactly as it appears on the page. Fractional and exponential notation both come out quite nice without being crammed into the space of a single fixed line.

I'm not quite sure what I think of this -- certainly by the time you get to a class where you might want to use a scientific calculator, you'll probably need one. In that regard, it's quite functional, though it does lack hex and octal modes and a couple of other things that a calculator being used in the Real World might want. (For that, we'll have to wait until they bring MathView to the TI-34 series next year.) But I'm torn -- is doing this a way of reducing copying errors, or just dumbing down the students by removing one more opportunity to check over their work? I really don't know. I do know that for overall usability, it's a significant improvement over the awkward two-line display used in the TI-30IIX, and a damn sight better than the old-school one-line TI-30Xa.

Another issue I have with this is that it's a TI, which automatically implies a premium price. The peculiar thing about Texas Instruments' calculator marketing is that it comes explicitly through their educational division. If you buy a graphing calculator for a math class, the software your teacher hands out will be TI software (most likely for an 82/83/84 series). I'm a little unsure what's going on here -- one could argue that TI is merely responding to a market, but given that CVS, one of the big three drugstore chains, doesn't carry TI product at all, and that Rite Aid rebrands gear from Chinese OEM builder Karce for much cheaper than TI gear, I'm very curious how TI still manages to command the prices they do for equipment that's not the absolute top of the line for its category. (Hell, HP's HP-50g costs exactly the same as the TI-89Ti and TI-Nspire and includes infrared and an SD slot. The Nspire gives you swappable keyboards, true, but that seems almost as self-defeating as Commodore's 3-system-in-1 architecture for the C128 proved to be.)

So, it's a nice calculator. I may try to replace it with something a little more advanced when the TI-34 gets the new display, and honestly I'll still have my comparatively ancient TI-83 around for games anyway. But the 30XS is a pretty nice calculator for general use, and it looks like the future of scientific calculators, especially since Casio is now shipping a very similar model.

On ministries for profit

2007-11-01T02:26:00.000-05:00

Many years ago I attended an evangelical-dominated high school. It was decent academically, but the bulk of the student body was shooting for middle-of-the-pack Christian colleges and seminaries, not small liberal arts schools or elite public (UMass) or private (Ivies, Boston College) schools. At one of the weekly chapels, we had a minister there to speak about "cults". Now, to those of you who aren't steeped in the evangelical tradition, the term "cult" means, in evangelese, something roughly equivalent to "heretic sect", not the expected definition of "coercive religious movement". As a result, this ministry happily grouped the Unitarian-Universalist Association (one of the least coercive of any churches) and the Baha'i in with groups such as the International Church of Christ (still the Boston Church of Christ at the time) and the Moonies, both of which are known to be quite coercive in their teachings and social structures and which would qualify as cults in most people's books.

Well, I dug up some of the booklets they gave out at that assembly the other night while searching for an old calculator manual, and went to look and see whether the ministry was still in business and whether they'd updated any of the tracts or not. The ministry is still there (and I will not dignify them with a name or a link). The pamphlets are still in print... but not online. They have to be ordered, hard copy only, at a price of $2-$4 each (some of them being no longer than 4 pages in length, plus a relatively elaborate cardstock cover). This flabbergasted me -- even Jack Chick, as reprehensible and outright insane a human being as he is, still posts his tracts online for people to read. They do have books for sale -- that they would not put them online is understandable -- but selling what are essentially short, poorly written FAQ lists for such high prices strikes me as being anathema to the very concept of a ministry. If the truth is so important, why are the curious forced to pay to hear it?

I've always thought the most blatant example of a Christian money grab piggybacking off someone else's work has to be Jason Gastrich's Skeptic's Annotated Bible, Corrected and Explained. Gastrich, a particularly odious minister with a string of false credentials and a marked tendency to ignore "keep out signs" (he is a major nuisance on Wikipedia, having been banned repeatedly but refusing to take no for an answer), has for several years been marketing a CD-ROM that claims to contain a complete refutation of the Skeptic's Annotated Bible (an admittedly somewhat sloppy but indispensable Bible reference for the anti-inerrantist). The kicker: the SAB is open-content. It is free for anyone to reference and costs nothing. The SAB-C&E is not. Whatever Gastrich's refutation is, it is apparently not important enough to him to make sure that as many people see it as possible -- instead, he'd rather make a buck off it. Such are the Elmer Gantrys of our age.

On a larger scale, what are we to do about James Dobson, the "evangelical Pope"? Focus on the Family is a huge ministry, spreading its ideas on childrearing and society far and wide and raking in substantial sums of money tax-free, to the resentment of many smaller commercial Christian publishing houses. Again, why is the money seemingly more important than the message?

I'm an atheist. I do volunteer work for a small Christian homeless outreach ministry, mostly on the TV production side helping out with public affairs programming. I have much respect for that sort of work, because even though I have no meaningful belief in God, I truly do believe it's the sort of thing that would-be messiahs throughout the ages, including most prominently Jesus and Buddha, preached to be done. It's my humanist mitzvah. I do it because getting good information out, with as few restrictions as possible, is something that greases the wheels in almost everyone's life; I'm a supporter of open source software for the same reason. Like I said, Jack Chick -- paranoid, hate-mongering, batshit-insane Jack Chick -- understands this point, even if his message is rotten to the core. What is so hard about this that we apparently can't get rid of the money changers in the temple?

To Lauren

2007-11-01T02:24:00.000-05:00

Don't do anything stupid. One day you may realize that people are trying to help. When that happens, all will be forgiven.

Shakeup at the Weekly Dig

2007-10-05T01:32:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Boston's Weekly Dig for a few years now, and always enjoyed it, to a great extent because of its lack of the Boston Phoenix's notorious Ivory Tower stuffiness. So it's with a bit of confusion taht I write about the firing of editor Michael Brodeur after eight months on the job. While, according to the local media blogs, it was a highly unpopular move with the staff, I'm not so sure his firing was actually a bad thing.

In the comments of one blog entry on the matter, Dig contributor Lissa Harris said that Brodeur had removed a lot of "extraneous junk" (my words) from the paper, and I find myself wondering -- does she not understand the concept that "content is king"? While I consistently like what the Dig does do, it oftentimes seems like they don't really do enough. A weekly David Thorpe column, while utterly awesome in its snarky majesty, still does not make up for no more than half a page of record reviews. The Dig's movie coverage, somewhat light at the best of times, does not even measure up to that of the Improper Bostonian (whose editor, Dig "Media Farm" stalkee Veronica Chao, has now coincidentally gone to the Boston Globe at around the same time as Brodeur's ouster -- maybe the Improper can go back to some of the investigative journalism it used to do?). And the "Department of Commerce" section, once consisting of several pages of interesting and cockeyed looks at current retail tchotchkes, is now a single page, more picture than text. (And then there's the glossy covers, which were received about as well as April's drastic redesign on Fark.com, and the debacle surrounding syndicated incomprehensible possibly-gossip columnist Cintra Wilson.)

I suspect there's quite a bit more to the story than the publisher, Jeff Lawrence, has said, and it sounds like a staffing train wreck in progress. I hope Lawrence can right the ship, though, and get the Dig off its diet and fill it out with top-notch content.

And regarding the Phoenix: Tom and Christine are a cough drop when you want a roll of Thin Mints. Can we get some decent sex/relationship writing back in the rag without pilfering Dan Savage from the Dig again? Even Barstool Sports does it better than the Phoenix. (And while you're at it, can you go down the hall to Stuff@night, get Booty Call back in print, and have Jeannie Greeley stop with the navelgazing or find a different beat? She's a great writer, but she comes off more like a sober Caroline Knapp than a lesbian Emily Pepper.)

Atheist radio needs listeners

2007-09-29T22:00:00.000-05:00

American Heathen at ShockNetRadio.com has to cut down its show schedule due to a need for more listeners. RJ Evans combines atheist/rationalist comedy and First Amendment badassery with a Howard Stern/KSEX comedy sensibility; go check it out this Friday night, and promote it on your own site.

Two eulogies and an odd conflict of interest

2007-09-07T01:31:00.000-05:00

Luciano Pavarotti is gone. I was not a fan of his music (or indeed his entire genre), but it's impossible to deny that he was likely one of the greatest musical talents of all time, and certainly one of the greatest since the creation of recorded music. And he was a foodie, an Italian foodie, from the land of pasta, Caterina De Medici's court cooks, and Slow Food. The world is the lesser for having lost him.

Paul Sullivan, former nighttime talker on Boston's WBZ, is dying -- some of his colleagues read a statement from his family tonight describing that they have given up treating his annoyingly recurrent brain cancer and put him in hospice care. Paul is one of those rarities in the 21st century commentariat -- a reasonable conservative. Unlike the loonies like Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Reilly who rule the airwaves, Sully has never been one to tolerate corruption and stupidity for the sake of ideological purity. Unlike the cerebral (and, admittedly, sometimes irritatingly pretentious but always legendary) David Brudnoy, Paul has always been a scrapper, Howie Carr without the assholishness, a center-right Simon Cowell with a scrupulous sense of fairness but a willingness to call bullshit when necessary. (I can't say I'm unhappy about his swing to a centrist position over the course of Bush 43's second term, but a willingness to change one's mind in the face of the evidence is always a virtue, never a flaw.) I hope his remaining time, however long it is, is pleasant.

Finally, the conflict of interest. For reasons that would be rather too weird to admit, I've been looking lately at ancient Greek and Hebrew instructional materials, and I find that Zondervan, the Bible publishers, have produced a series of texts on both languages. Maybe it's just the fact that I'm an atheist with a disgust for American religion, or possibly a bit of latent anti-Protestant prejudice from my Catholic upbringing, but I can't see how this is not a bit sketchy. Am I to believe that a Christian publisher (with a well-known evangelical ax to grind) can provide a truly objective course on the Biblical language without contaminating vocabulary and translations with Christian codewords? And can I reasonably believe that a Christian perspective can provide me with a reliable education in Hebrew? (Frankly, I'd rather have an explicitly secular Greek text and a secular or Jewish-written Hebrew text.) And yet I'm sure these programs will be taken up at Bible colleges across the country. (I'm not saying, mind you, that a Christian can't be objective. I just don't think that writing a language text with an agenda is a good idea. Publishing through a house like Zondervan pretty much implies a support for that agenda, whether Zondervan and its authors intend it that way or not.)

On Dr. Gryboski

2007-08-27T00:52:00.000-05:00

Pat Desmarais wants you to think that Ann Gryboski is an uppity bitch.

Forced to listen to about fifteen minutes of one of WBZ's third-string dittoheads last Thursday night, I was forced to that conclusion after listening to Desmarais whip up the rubes in what appeared to me to be blatant character assassination by what the "9/11 Truth" skeptics call JAQing off, that is, "Just Asking Questions" in a leading manner designed to prejudice the listener. The mouthbreathers calling in (the sort Paul Sullivan would have had little patience with) were eating it up.

Well, folks, it's like this. The grand jury felt that the self-defense plea was corroborated and refused to indict. The psychology of abusive relationships is complex and sometimes nonsensical, but that makes it all the more important to understand the situation before judging or shut the fuck up. I don't care that some have said that Dr. Gryboski is not the nicest person in a social setting. What I know is that a grand jury looked at the evidence and let her off. Give her her medical license back and let her have her life back -- anything less is vigilantism, and there's a reason that's frowned upon.

The misogynists in this world are getting a little too loud for comfort lately. Let's show them up for the bigots they are and send them back to the 19th century. (And while we're at it, can WBZ replace Desmarais and Bradley Jay with someone who isn't on the VRWC talking points mailing list? They're a blight on one of the greatest radio stations in the country.)

Blowing the dust off

2007-08-08T18:23:00.000-05:00

I gotta write more... someone will find this blog eventually and want to read it...

Anyway, things are the same as they've always been. I've been doing some work over at RationalWiki, and encourage others of like mind to contribute as well.

Take what you want and leave the rest

2007-07-11T19:16:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia entry on ESR (check the history for the specific version I was reading)

As much as I've always advocated Eric Raymond's pragmatist view of open source software (like it or not, you can't always get what you want), I've always thought Raymond's political views were a bit out there. He's a self-proclaimed gun nut in a climate where people around the world criticize the US's weirdly manic stance on guns, and he's a radical libertarian in a world where regulation has proven itself necessary time and again.

But now he's apparently turned the Jargon File into his own personal political mouthpiece, not to mention openly espousing "The Bell Curve" when virtually no one without a racial ax to grind accepts it (the article references a blog post from '03, which is just a measure of how much time I've spent away from the hacker world), neo-conservatism and its associated rhetoric, and generally trying to make the hacker world more political than it has to be.

It's time for ESR to hand the baton off to someone a little less fringey. While I think his fundamental attitude towards Open Source is sound, it's time to find a spokesperson with fewer embarrassing other-subject opinions.

We'll miss you, Natalie

2007-07-11T12:45:00.000-05:00

Ah, Natalie Jacobson. Quite simply the greatest anchor on Boston television in my lifetime. We shall miss you, and I hope dopey Fee and Raposa were wrong about your reasons for leaving.

And a pox on the Herald for remarking on her clothing when she announced her departure. A) It's irrelevant because she always was about the news and not looks, and B) she looks damn good even with the wrinkles, so the commentary was not only inappropriate but redundant.

Stamford, we have a problem

2007-06-29T22:30:00.000-05:00

I was a wrestling fan for a while, around the turn of the millennium when Vince McMahon had real competition and therefore was required to give a damn. I'm not going to elaborate much on that whole period, except to say in that time and right up until his apparent murder-suicide, Chris Benoit was definitely one of the best performers in the show. However, given his distinctively sack-of-potatoes-like physique, his steroid use should have been pretty obvious, at least as obvious as Scott Steiner's balloon-animal biceps. What the hell is the WWE's "wellness program" actually doing? (Keep in mind this is a business where the sanest performer out there is Mick Foley, who once jumped in a pile of thumbtacks and has taken enough head shots to make even Troy Aikman, Mr. Concussion himself, woozy.)

I mean, fundamentally, where can you go with this? A couple of years ago, the porn industry was hit with its worst nightmare, an HIV scare. Having been through it before, the San Fernando Valley shut down and cleaned up. The porn industry knows what's up -- ultimately, the health of your talent is paramount, and losing a little money to keep them healthy is a smart long-term bet. There are sports coaches who don't get this. And Vince McMahon obviously knows this, because he pays lip service to it on a semi-regular basis.

Pro wrestling needs to be cleaned up. Look at Paul Wight, abusing himself out of a career even though he must know damn well he stands a good chance of not making it to 50. Look at the endless list of names claimed by heart problems, drugs, and mental issues: Curt Hennig, Bam Bam Bigelow, Mike Lockwood, Miss Elizabeth, Eddie Guerrero, Rick Rude, on, and on (I'd add Owen Hart, but his death was pedestrian in comparison). And the injuries -- Darren Drozdov (paralyzed), Bret Hart (brain injury), Mick Foley (too many to list -- he's hamburger on the hoof), Steve Austin (cumulative knee joint damage from too many bouts while injured). And Vince, the ringmaster, changes things slowly if at all, and the minor feds keep on in the same vein.

Let's call a halt to the whole thing for a few months and put the industry leaders (especially Vince) under the threat of heavy regulation. Bring it back for the fall TV season with some safeguards in place -- wrestling may not be a sport per se, but it's damned intense and it's a very popular form of entertainment. The watchword should be "Fix it or else".

And after that's done, let's talk about legal protection for sex workers. You think wrestling's a mess...

White's Path Sessions -- The Zookeepers

2007-06-23T15:38:00.000-05:00

The Zookeepers on Myspace.com

This afternoon we taped a local group called the Zookeepers, out of right here in Yarmouth. They're a rather unique group, with bits and pieces of everything from Led Zeppelin to Sublime to Marilyn Manson in their sound. If you like experimental punk, definitely give them a listen. I don't know yet what they plan to do with the footage on their own, but if you're out of the C3TV viewing range check them out on Myspace.

UPDATE 7/2/07: I had the wrong URL for a different Zookeepers on myspace. The link is www.myspace.com/thezookeepers, and it's been fixed.

Nice tomatoes, and the food's good too

2007-06-21T00:33:00.000-05:00

As sometimes happens on letters pages in magazines, a spat has erupted on that one belonging to TV Guide. A couple of weeks ago, they published a Reader Jeer complaining about Giada De Laurentiis' trademark cleavage display. The following week, the letters page seems to be about two to one in favor of letting Giada dress however she wants. My perspective is as follows:

Lighten up. Giada is an excellent and creative cook with excellent TV presence, and she is also an attractive woman with large breasts. Proceeding on the assumption that she has final say over her onscreen wardrobe, I'd say she's earned the right to do the show on the beach in a Wicked Weasel if she wants (though that wouldn't exactly be a cooking-friendly wardrobe -- maybe add some board shorts :-) ). It's like Muhammad Ali -- at the end of the day, he may have been too political and too much of a braggart for many people, but in his day he was that damned good and had pretty much earned the right to speak his mind. (Compare incompetent skank Sandra Lee and grouchy, cheating Barry Bonds.)

So ease up on the cleaage already.

Cheap publicity stunt (need bad advice?)

2007-06-18T01:14:00.000-05:00

Soliciting questions on Craigslist

I just feel like trying the advice column thing. The disclaimer: you will likely recieve bad advice on whatever questions you ask. But hey, try it anyway. The best ones will be posted here.

Breaks and promises

2007-06-13T21:14:00.000-05:00

A few thoughts on one of my current favorite webcomics:

Okay, Sortelli is on a break. That's fine. But why progress reports on the next comic if you're on break, especially if it's supposedly inked already? A few points:

Duke/Nimoy Forever. Or, less caustically...
"A speckled axe is best." -Ben Franklin.
Real artists ship.

Good thing I have no actual readers, or I'd be blackballed from the EOI forums for this.

UPDATE: Sortelli posted a teaser on the comic forums. Looking good.

My recipe blog

2007-05-18T15:40:00.000-05:00

The Off Season Blog, named after my sporadically produced cooking show, is going to be my site for posting recipes, and hopefully also the official website for my cooking show when I get around to putting it back on the air.

HDTV and the shovelware problem; in praise of The Tube

2007-05-17T01:28:00.000-05:00

The plan for HDTV, I had always assumed, was to provide flagship programming in as visually striking a manner as possible. By and large, the main network broadcasters and the sports stations do a fine job of this, and the sports stations in particular have made what I think is the most compelling case for going hi-def. It is possible, mind you, to make some very nice eye candy, and you do see it here and there in travel documentaries and the like on PBS-HD. But if flagship programming is what it's all about, why are the cable stations by and large doing such a half-assed job of it?

Comcast just picked up Food Network HD and HGTV HD in my local area. While it's nice to see that Scripps and Comcast came to an agreement (I believe those two stations have been on the big dish systems for some time now), I'm kind of having a problem with their implementation. It seems like Scripps is just the latest in a line of HD providers who have put out an HD product that is little better than a random feed of programming from other stations that happens to have been taped in HD. The hi-def content is fine as far as it goes, but to look at the HD channel's presentation on foodtv.com, you do get the sense that it's an afterthought, something that's farmed out to a junior exec to be done in one's Copious Free Time. And a lot of stations are like that; I think MTV Networks' MHD is probably the most egregious, given that it seems to have entirely too little original content to sustain it, though Discovery HD isn't much better, and PBS-HD seems to do at best a half-assed job of being a flagship.

Hey, HD folks, can we get on the ball here? HD isn't that expensive to produce anymore, with decent-quality cameras available in the $1000 to $1500 range (and that's just for consumer gear; a Sony HDR-FX1 isn't drastically more expensive than a Canon GL-2). I realize overhauling the Emeril Live studio would be a huge undertaking, but c'mon. Not everything has to be done in a full studio setting. I did my show with a single camcorder in my kitchen.

And another thing: I like The Tube. It's carried over-the-air on WLVI 56 and on channel 296 on our local cable system, and it's pretty much the Jack FM of television, with a remarkable profusion of videos from the last thirty years or so of music video history, along with an equally remarkable library of live concert footage that goes well beyond anything MTV ever put on the air, ever.

Jerry Falwell: Good Riddance

2007-05-15T16:59:00.000-05:00

And the conservative blogosphere is already wringing their hands about the outpouring of glee and schadenfreude at this shameful, disgusting man's death.

Look, no one deserves death. And inasmuch as I have any sympathy at all, it's for his family, not him. The thing that is being celebrated here is his exit from public life, and the only thing I see wrong here is that he went out by death rather than the total public shaming he truly deserved.

Sadly, there are many of his like still out there. I hope they change their ways, but that's pretty much a pipe dream.

Oooh, tomatoes

2007-05-05T12:19:00.000-05:00

My little San Marzano seedlings are getting big. I have to replant them into pots soon...

When you get slapped

2007-04-16T21:30:00.000-05:00

I don't know anyone personally who is a student at Virginia Tech. But what happened today is horrifying beyond measure (and if you can say that about the deaths of 33 with no irony at all, imagine how much more so 9/11, the Spanish train bombings, the London transport bombings, or any given day in Iraq...). The odd thing about it is that it happened on Marathon Monday, where two Japanese wheelchair athletes and a Russian woman took their races and a veteran marathoner from Kenya took his third Boston. If this sounds like a strange juxtaposition, I mention it only because things like this have happened on Marathon Monday before, specifically the Waco debacle. I still remember, years later, seeing shots of the burning Branch Davidian compound intercut with the Marathon coverage, and just sort of looking at it incomprehendingly until it finally hit me in mid-afternoon that the siege had ended, and ended badly.

I had to go out and buy the papers tonight, hours after the massacre had ended. I couldn't help but remark to the person at the newsstand register that it was weird picking up a paper that had been printed early that morning in light of what had happened later today. The newspaper is, literally, yesterday's news. Imagine picking up a newspaper on 9/11 -- less than an hour after you picked up that paper on the way to work, the World Trade Center was in flames. If you kept that newspaper as a memento, you might put it away and forget what it said for a while, until a few years later you pull it out... and there is nothing extraordinary at all in there. It's an inherent thing in newspapers, not really a flaw when you can get your news practically instantly on the radio or net, but it's still a strange feeling.

A lot of people are talking about gun control in the wake of this mass murder. That's a perfectly understandable thing. I'm very unsure on the subject of gun ownership and the Second Amendment, so I don't know that I have much to contribute. I will say that by and large I think gun control is a good thing, but it's really very hard to find a happy medium, since the pro-gun and gun-control positions, like so many others in the United States, are extremely polarized. So what do you do when something needs to be done but there is no reasonable hope of compromise?

Thirty-three dead people on a college campus would like to know the answer to that. I fear there is none.

Alanis, you magnificent bastard

2007-04-04T00:45:00.000-05:00

Take one of the most embarrassing backfires in hip-hop history and turn it over to one of the best-selling female singer-songwriters of the 90s, and you get this. Words fail me. (Incidentally, although I don't think anyone's ever called Alanis Morissette a beauty queen, she's still prettier than butterface Fergie. Not to mention a much better singer.)

Cucina di geek

2007-03-26T15:40:00.000-05:00

If you're one of the few people who reads this blog, you need to check out one of the most recent entries on Shelley Batts' Retrospectacle on ScienceBlogs.com: Cooking for Engineers (and 24 watchers). Shelley is looking for information on cooking and links the Cooking for Engineers website, a uniquely geek-oriented site for those interested in kitchen hacking. There isn't a huge number of recipes on the site, but the ones they do have (I'd guess offhand there's about 100) are illustrated step-by-step and then summarized in a simple but clever graphical format. Honestly, I rather hope the site owner (one Michael Chu) publishes a cookbook of this material someday, as I quite like his approach.

I actually came up with a couple of ideas to get my old show back on the air. I've had some interest in campsite cooking, so I'd like to try some of that. I still have an idea that I'd like to do some breakfast foods that I like, particularly a Dutch baby pancake. I'm also strongly tempted to do a show on prison loaf, except that I can't imagine that anyone would actually willingly eat that stuff. Maybe as punishment for fussy toddlers that won't eat their vegetables...

triggerhappy@conservapedia.com

2007-03-24T19:31:00.000-05:00

A little advice to would-be Conservapedia trolls: you have to be subtle. You can only get away with horribly slanted articles on an issue they care about; they're likely to demand objectivity on anything that isn't a hot-button issue (amusing bit of inconsistency there). Also, make sure you've got everything spell-checked and properly cited before it goes up -- they're very quick on the trigger over there. So much for intellectual honesty.

some ideas

2007-03-24T11:49:00.001-05:00

You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to take a ride out here and do a show on outdoor cooking. It would require some money, though, and probably some *gasp* training. I actually had this whole idea about "extreme cooking", but I'm not sure how that would work.

Also: Viacom and YouTube, not getting along too well at the moment. Here's a thought: Viacom: you're getting free publicity. Work out a settlement.

Submarines, and a new show

2007-03-12T00:17:00.000-05:00

Well, I managed to fill in my March 7 date, at practically the last second believe it or not. Check out Stephanie Romano at MySpace -- she's a regular on the Cape Cod karaoke circuit, and while in general I'm not a big fan of the country music she likes to sing, she's a hell of a singer and I'm more than happy to give her any exposure I can.

So we took my nephew down to Providence to visit the Juliett 484 Russian Sub Museum -- it's a real, honest-to-Marx Soviet Navy missile sub of early 60s vintage; due to an interesting string of ownership changes it is now the sister ship of the retired aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, which it is thought to have shadowed on several occasions in its Soviet naval career. It's in a sleepy little riverside park on the Providence River, in the shadow of the new I-195 highway bridge. While it doesn't seem to be as popular as its down-the-highway WWII ship museum at Battleship Cove in Fall River, MA, it's still worth the trip.

The Juliett class (the NATO name -- the Russians called it Project 651 according to Wikipedia) was an interesting one -- designed originally to carry and potentially deliver nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to American cities, the class seems to have settled into a jack-of-all-trades role after being obsoleted by later nuclear-powered subs. The hull is covered with thick rubber plating to muffle operating noise, and while it's over 300 feet long with several decks, you wouldn't know it once you were inside the crew compartment.

The thing that struck me most about it was the hatch design. See, it's a generally accepted truism about the difference between Soviet and American engineering (at least when the Soviet version wasn't a blatant ripoff of the American version) that while American engineers try to design elegantly (and a result, often temperamentally), the Russians have a habit of using brute-force solutions that are less likely to break under pressure (as a result, it's been said that Russian cars, while by and large crappy, tend to be very good at starting in cold weather). In this sub design, nothing shows that so much as the way the ship is compartmented -- eight sections, separated by round watertight hatches no more than three feet in diameter that sometimes require a bit of ingenuity to get through. For several of them (though not all), I found the best way to get through was to grab a handhold near the hatch and swing through feet-first.

Quarters are tight -- even the captain's room is barely larger than a standard office desk, and the galley is comparable to that on an airliner, only with a full complement of cooking equipment. The officer's mess doubles as an operating room, and the doctor's office (the Soviets put real doctors on their boats, as opposed to the American practice of putting what were basically specialized EMTs on board) doubles as the infirmary and the doctor's quarters. The entrance to the sonar room was so closed in with equipment that I had some trouble squeezing through -- no fat people in the submarine service. And the worst luck went to the 40 enlisted crew (out of a crew of 82) -- they had to share 20 hanging cots wedged carefully into what was essentially the forward torpedo bay. Showers once a week, and three toilets for 82 men. Truly it takes a special kind of person to work in a submarine -- one with no personal space or sense of shame and a strong tolerance for bad hygeine.

J484 (or, to give it its Soviet designation, K-77) is a rather interesting boat historically as well -- after a decidedly shadowy service record (it wasn't until it was sold to the Saratoga museum people in Rhode Island that its Soviet Navy designation was even known for certain), it spent time as part of a restaurant in Finland, was used as a movie set for "K-19: The Widowmaker", and then changed hands between a couple of different preservationist groups until winding up in Providence. It's definitely worth a visit for anyone interested in naval history, as well as a rather chilling reminder that, given the events in world politics that transpired from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War, we're lucky to be here to see it at all.

Random stuff

2007-02-27T02:12:00.000-05:00

I went on a LiveCD bender recently. I've found a remarkably efficient method for making coasters.

New taping coming up March 7. I hope.

I need to get my cooking show going again. I made a big puffy German pancake the other day and I really, really want to put the recipe on TV.

Finally, I hear Al Gore's Current network is going on the air in the UK on BskyB in the middle of March. Good stuff, good stuff. I like Current quite a lot, and I wish it much success.

5318008!!ONE!!1!

2007-02-07T09:35:00.000-05:00

Lowell Cable Bares it All

Oh, boy. Nudity on public access TV. The world's going to end because someone put breasts on their local cable station! What is this world coming to? Kill Janet Jackson! Waaah!

Oy.

Someone please tell me why this is such a big deal. Do any of these people actually listen to the kind of music this show New England PGM was playing? Some of it's pretty explicit, and really, that's not that big a deal. Around C3TV, the usual practice should some of that kind of material come in (which really doesn't happen all that often, it being the Cape and all), it goes on the graveyard slot. Big deal. This stuff's on broadcast TV in other countries.

Blasphemy Challenge redux

2007-01-29T16:28:00.000-05:00

From the excellent PZ Myers:

John Kasich is a big fat idiot

I note the interesting implication in Kasich's questions (asking why Challenge-takers only go after Christianity, not Islam) that the creators of the Challenge have some have some kind of editorial control over the content of the videos. I'm not too sure what that says about the editorial standards at Fox -- did they just not do their research, or are they, as they so often do, intentionally distorting the facts? Or is this just another case of sectarian blindness, where the people saying the inaccuracies just don't get that other people don't do things the way they do?

Call me Johnny Penguinseed

2007-01-24T01:29:00.000-05:00

I'm going to try something.

I've just burned four Knoppix CDs, the latest (5.1.1) version. The next four people I hear bitch about Microsoft Windows while I have my backpack with me will get copies.

I wonder how long it will take to get rid of them?

The musical equivalent of the Harriet Miers nomination

2007-01-19T23:54:00.000-05:00

The Grammy folks nominated "My Humps" by Black Eyed Peas for best vocal performance by a duo or group. This constituted a great big dump taken by the record industry on any and every concept of good musical taste ever created.

And to prolong the agony, check out this link.

A sure sign I'm losing it

2007-01-14T20:44:00.000-05:00

Let's see... I have a camcorder and a tripod. Now I'm trying to build a home TV studio for under $10. I might even be able to pull it off if I can find the proper mounting hardware in the garage -- I've already got a white sheet and a 150w-equivalent fluorescent bulb, total cost $6. Of course I also have a mountain of crap to move...

Dragging my feet...

2007-01-12T02:21:00.000-05:00

In theory, I'm all for the Blasphemy Challenge. I think it's a fine thing for the faithless to announce their faithlessness, since there's an awful lot of people who just don't get what it means to be without faith. I'm a little iffy about targeting teenagers, not because I don't think they can think for themselves, but because I think a lot of teenage faithless don't really understand the difference between anger at God and lack of belief. To the many teenagers that have taken the Blasphemy Challenge, I applaud their courage to take a stand on their beliefs (or lack thereof), but I also ask that they spend some time understanding why others don't believe, or they may find themselves sucked into the "what if I'm wrong?" trap. At the very least, such education can make you understand that while you might be wrong, there's a very good chance "they" (whoever "they" may be, depending on each individual's upbringing) are wrong as well.

So why the hell haven't I done my video? I like to think I lost my faith for the right reasons, and yet, I don't have my video up on YouTube, even though I've been thinking about it for three weeks, even reorganized my MP3 collection to make room for editing on my hard drive?

Man, I suck.

On God and Television

2007-01-06T15:01:00.000-05:00

Public affairs programming is dull; I don't think anyone disputes that, even the most wonkish of C-SPAN junkies. That's how it happens -- not too many people enjoy dealing with administrivia, but it's got to be done. As it happens I've done quite a bit of public affairs programming and it's usually pretty much the same -- the host has in a guest or two to discuss some pressing affair such as homelessness or emergency preparedness. It's dry, but generally important.

Now I'm a militant agnostic, have been for a little over five years (I grew up Catholic but gave up on religion in general as irrelevant to my life). Being as I live on Cape Cod, a good majority of the people I work with at C3TV are religious and devoutly so, and I do in fact do work on one program of a religious nature. As a result, I find myself with an inside perspective on the matter (a perspective that for the most part involves one ear on a single volume slider and both eyes on a good book, but still), and I have to say, the single-talking-head format just doesn't work. No one's gotten it right yet -- not Mother Angelica, not any number of televangelists, no one. It's the most lethally dull form of programming on television. (Note that Pat Robertson at least has someone to bounce his ravings off of in the studio. He knows better.)

The thing that gets me is that there is a lot of great church culture -- music, architecture, literature. But none of it seems to come out of the modern Christian pop culture, which generally seems to have all the fun surgically removed for the purposes of teaching a Biblical lesson (possible exception: VeggieTales, which I've heard is actually pretty good). And let's face it -- no matter how scintillating a preacher may be, there really isn't much to be seen on a program that's all sermon.

On the Whole Product

2007-01-06T01:19:00.000-05:00

Is it just me, or has the entertainment industry made a gawdawful hash of the concept of the Whole Product, at least as it applies to home entertainment?

I'd say the VHS format is the most spectacularly successful example of the Whole Product in the entertainment world (with, possibly, the audiocassette). The Whole Product is very important when discussing VHS, because the current conventional wisdom says this is how VHS won the standards war against Betamax. The story is well known -- JVC made VHS a more open and more flexible standard than Sony did with Beta, with longer recording times (especially the EP setting on NTSC gear) and a more open licensing policy beating out a theoretically better picture to create a juggernaut of a standard, one that ruled the roost for over twenty-five years until getting beat out by the DVD.

You will not find a better illustration of the Whole Product concept than the VHS standard. Not only can you record television programs on a VHS VCR with no limitation, you can also use a VHS camcorder to record your own content and play it back on the same VCR. At this point, you also have the option of multiple venues for your work, from the TV in the kitchen all the way up to the local public access station, or even YouTube or Current if you can digitize your footage.

No other format has this kind of flexibility. VHS is the least common denominator for everything. Everything works the same, all the media is interchangeable. Granted, shitty picture, but still. Everyone has it. Everyone knows how to work with it. It's on the way out, but it's still here and not likely to go away completely any time soon. It's democracy on a half-inch tape.

Now, compare the current move to high-definition television.

The entertainment industry has butchered promising new standards to preserve its profits and control many times. DAT died in 2005; MiniDisc will probably follow it this year or next. Both were heavily encumbered by the **AAs' fear of losing revenue to digital copying. DV is another example; while you will never find a better format for standard-definition video acquisition (equipment is cheap and generally produces a high-quality picture), the idea of it becoming the next VHS died on the vine because its creators didn't give the entertainment industry its pound of flesh. No, it's all about DVD these days. DVD is a great idea, mind you, but it has flaws -- copy protection, for example, and the bizarre and often incompatible bestiary that is the recordable DVD market. The Whole Product is rather lacking in all those cases.

But the high-definition world is a whole 'nother level of nuts. Everything is locked down -- I once had a TV have a hissyfit about compromised DRM because I rebooted the cable box. BluRay video has an entire suite of nefarious garbage implemented and ready to go to make life a living hell for anyone who dares use their BluRay movies in a way not approved by the studio. On the production side, the tools are there (although the cameras are rather pricey), but there are no venues for your finished high-def project. That puts us back to living room film festivals like in the old days. Bottom line: they aren't going to give you the whole product, because you might -- might -- use it in a way that they don't approve of or didn't think of, and because every eyeball you have watching your low-budget cooking show is an eyeball that isn't watching their product.

So think about that a moment before you do an upload or turn in a videotape to the scheduling office. Unless you get a break with a big production company, this is as good as it's ever going to get.

Intros are for suckers

2007-01-06T01:17:00.000-05:00

Besides, no one is ever going to go this far back in the archives anyway... Eh, what the hell.

I'm Brian. I keep myself busy doing volunteer work at the Cape Cod Community Media Center and I'm hoping to go pro with it Real Soon Now. I used to be more of a computer geek, but not so much anymore. These days it's more video and audio stuff. And I do a lot of cooking.