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Month: November 2004

A matter of message

Published November 13, 2004

Joshua Micah Marshall exhibits some uncommon insight in this essay:

> I think I can tell you what the Republicans are for and without referencing hardly any policy specifics. They’re for lowering taxes in exchange for giving up whatever it is the government pretends to do for us, (at a minimum) riding the brakes on the on-going transformation of American culture, and kicking ass abroad.
>
> That’s a clear message and a fairly coherent one, whatever you think of the content — it’s about self-reliance and suspicion of change. And Democrats have a hard time competing at that level of message clarity.
>
> What’s the Dems’ message, boiled down to as few words, and framed in terms [of] simple imperatives and aspirations, rather than policy? And which are the do-or-die issues, and which are expendable?

I recommend the entire article to those who, like me, are disappointed both with the results of last week’s election and with the aftermath, and are wondering what happens next.

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Pardon Our Dust

Published November 12, 2004

If anyone out there was checking the blog during the day, they may have noticed the appearance flipping around a bit. Turns out I was editing the CSS stylesheet directly on my web site, where it got overwritten the next time I published (silly me). It took me a while to find it in the “templates” list of MT; poking around my web site didn’t reveal any obvious source file. Guess I’m still getting used to this whole CMS thing; I remember when we had to make our websites by hand, with stone knives and bear skins…

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The True Story of Audion

Published November 12, 2004

This is a must-read story of the rise and fall of one Macintosh software application that struggled to persevere, in a world where… sorry, this is not that kind of blurb. Just go read it. Please click every link in the story as well.

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Still shopping around

Published November 11, 2004

As you can see, I’ve installed [Movable Type](http://www.movabletype.com). I hoped it would be easier to get things like comments and trackbacks working. Plus I can check out the very promising [MarsEdit](http://ranchero.com/marsedit/) for writing posts. And now my blog looks less spartan and more… well, more like every other MT blog. But hopefully that can be addressed too.

After my experience with WordPress, I installed MT to use Berkeley DB rather than MySQL, but since the dynamic publishing capabilities seem to require MySQL, I may have to switch over again. Probably I should do that before I get too many entries here.

…speaking of which, I seem to have changed over just after [Nick](http://www.nickbastin.com/archives/000146.php) became the first person to link to me. And now I’ve gone and broken those links. [Edit: I made an effort to see if I could fix this with an appropriate set of RewriteRules, but that way lies madness, so I guess Nick will just have to fix his links.] Sorry, Nick.

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Tony, Tony

Published November 10, 2004

Concerning the new incarnation of the Tony Kornheiser show:

  • It’s only broadcast in Washington, DC, by contract (i.e. no syndication);

  • It is available over the Internet, however, at SportsTalk 980’s website;

  • iRecordMusic works just fine;

  • It’s apparently a two hour program from 9 to 11, immediately repeated from 11 to 1 (all times Eastern). (I’d have been shocked if TK went back for four hours. At his age?)

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This is getting out of hand

Published November 10, 2004

About a month ago a coworker offered me a Gmail invitation. Although I prefer to use a regular IMAP mail client to access my mail, I figured I’d take him up on the offer and reserve a reasonable email address.

The next time I logged into Gmail was this morning. Of course I had no new messages in my inbox, which is not surprising since I’d never given this address to anyone.

I did, however, have a piece of spam. Received less than three weeks after creating the Gmail address. Which (to repeat) I never gave to anyone. And which uses a different account name than the one I normally use (at which I get about 750 pieces of spam a month).

By the way, Gmail’s filters had caught the spam. Good to know, and no less than I’d expect, really. So if I post a feedback link to this blog, I may well use that address instead.

But really, the whole thing was quite breathtaking. They say 75% of the traffic that crosses the Internet these days is spam. I’m beginning to think it’s time to chuck SMTP and invent a new, fully authenticating mail protocol.

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Mr. Tony returns

Published November 9, 2004

Tony Kornheiser returns to the Washington, DC radio airwaves starting tomorrow, mornings from 9 to 1, on AM 980. (Four hours? Really?)

Good news for those of us who basically stopped listening to sports radio when TK went off the air last March. (Well, there’s sports radio, and then there’s Tony. I don’t listen to sports radio.)

Looks like it’s time to buy a RadioShark…

(…or else capture the audio stream with something like Audio Hijack or iRecordMusic…)

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Two Americas? This is not what I had in mind…

Published November 9, 2004

So part of the goal of this blog was to allow me to vent my spleen by adding my voice to the throng. Hopefully I can learn to make a pithy comment and leave it at that, instead of my usual style of pondering each phrase trying to make it say exactly what I mean.

The problem with commenting on an article like this one (“courtesy” of Atrios via Josh Marshall), written by a Mr. Mike Thompson, “past chairman of the Florida Conservative Union” (and apparently Ann Coulter’s godfather) — is that I hardly know where to begin, or where to leave off.

Read the linked article if you dare. No matter how the author tries to cast it as Swiftian satire, his “modest proposal” of “expelling” the twelve bluest states betrays more bile than wit. I’ll try to resist the urge to respond point by point, because I don’t make my living doing this. But let me observe that expelling Illinois, along with California and the Northeast, is going to come as a shock to a lot of people living outside Chicago. (For that matter, a lot of people living in New Hampshire are going to be pretty p*ssed off too. Has Mr. Thompson ever travelled outside Florida?)

After reading comments like “liberals … are spiteful enemies of civilization’s core decency and traditions” and “the genes of liberals have rendered them immune to all forms of filth” (among the milder ones), it’s difficult to come across “When they tire of showering conservative victims with ideological mud” without laughing out loud. Pot. Kettle. Black?

The point-by-point comparison of “Bush USA” vs. “Gore/Kerry USA” is also entertainingly bewildering. Mr. Thompson makes Bush USA sound like Mayberry USA, while Gore/Kerry USA sounds more like the Lower East Side of Manhattan (“ethnically diverse”, “multi-religious”, “very artsy, and Babelesque, with abnormally loud speakers”). Again, this will come as a surprise to my neighbors in the small town in Maryland where I live, many of whom are not actually gay or Jewish.

(Also, Bush USA is “economically sound (except for a few farms), but not drunk with cyberworld business development”, while Gore/Kerry USA is “both high tech and oddly primitive in its commerce”. Huh? Thog give Grog two goats for Grog’s iMac G5?)

But in the end, I’m not entertained, or enraged, so much as saddened by this commentary. Has the state of the nation deteriorated to the point where an author can write that people who disagree with his point of view should be expelled from the country, with the apparent expectation that his readership will nod approvingly?

Apparently Mr. Thompson and his ilk would happily return this country to the 50’s — the 1850’s.

It would be easy if glib to agree that I’d prefer not to live in the same country
with Mr. Thompson — but that’s wrong. Likewise the memes running around the net about moving to Canada or Australia for the duration — jokes, I know, in the aftermath of crushing disappointment; but wrong.

This is my country, too. And nobody — not Mr. Thompson, not Karl Rove — is going to tell me that I’m unfit to live in it, because of where I live or what I believe or who I am.

[On that note, let me give a shout out to my coworker Dave and his friend Kevin, who have started a blog called Still Fighting. As soon as I figure out how to make a blogroll, they’ll be on it.]

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Preface to an introduction

Published November 6, 2004

Random comments about what all this is, exactly:

  • Yes, this is a really barebones weblog right now. I like a clean design… but maybe not this clean. I’ll probably poke around with some CSS at some point, but right now I’m more interested in writing comments. (Any thematic pointers or donations are of course welcome.)

  • What am I doing commenting on C#? I’ve never even written any code in C#. Those comments were occasioned upon the release of Mono 1.0, which I downloaded to my PowerBook, poked around in briefly, and bought a couple of books. This last action engendered a couple of rants which I decided were too ranty to keep as email messages, so I posted them. Then life intervened. In the future you’re more likely to see comments about Python, C++, and C (whatever there is to say about C).

  • “A weblog, huh?” I’ve been slowly drifting towards a mid-life — well, not “crisis” exactly, but something close. The results of the 2004 general election in the United States have accelerated that process. [You might infer from the first posting in “politics” below where I stood in the election, and what my mood is like this week.] So what’s the point of having a web site if I can’t share my angst with the world at large? At the very least, I can get things off my chest, and maybe the act of writing will help set my thoughts in order. (I guarantee no cat pictures. Ever. Might get a dog someday, though.)

  • Speaking of the world at large, I expect to address some of my comments to a wider audience — those of you outside our borders who are wondering what the hell just happened. (So are 49% of us.) I may even dust off some old books and write some thoughts in Esperanto, which I studied some as a teenager but have not done much with since then.

  • Yes, I’m quite a geek. Besides Esperanto, I spent my teen years getting a ham radio license, going to science fiction conventions, and playing table-top baseball simulation games (the old-fashioned way, with dice and charts, though believe me if I’d had a computer at home back then I’d have been all over it). In adulthood, I’ve owned a variety of Macs and even two Newtons. Despite this, I’m married to a beautiful woman and have a wonderful daughter and a baby boy on the way, so there’s hope for you junior geeks.

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Words fail me

Published November 5, 2004

Quoted on BoingBoing:

“I got a very clear picture of [Bush’s] base constituency when having a discussion over lunch with some co-workers about our favorite children’s shows. I was commenting on how much I liked Sesame Street, and one woman (a very vocal Christian conservative) said, ‘Oooh.. Sesame Street is too tolerant for me.’ To my horror, several other women nodded their heads in agreement. I guess I didn’t even think there was such a thing as too tolerant.”

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