Montag, 10. Mai 2004

If you don't have a blog yet, Google's Blogger service is free and has just went through a major redesign. Even as a professional web developer, I have to say that using blogging software is a heckuva lot more convenient than having to code my own site.

10.05.2004 00:24:32 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback
 Sonntag, 9. Mai 2004

Once Rupert was kicked out, my only concern was that Rob not win the game. Turns out he walked away with the million dollars (three words: "community property state"), the girl, and the car (two even). If Rupert doesn't win the "America's Choice" $1mm, I may swear off of Survivor for a season or two. Lex is partially right: this isn't chess. It's a games based on the premise of trading friendship and trust for votes. Rupert, among others, played with integrity and came close enough to show that it can be done.

Richard and Lex's conversation during the reunion show did give me an idea: a reality version of Monopoly. Take a few blocks of NYC and have a bunch of contestants "buying" properties, charging each other rent, collecting checks at one corner and having to live in a glass jail cell on another. Haven't thought it through completely, just a quick idea. How would people play a "real game" when the elements of teamwork and strategy come into it?

09.05.2004 22:53:58 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [1]Trackback

So what's the difference between Chechenya and our own country's beginnings? In both cases, a dying old empire is supressing the freedoms of a people who happen to be living on top of natural resources that empire wants.

The only difference? Russia is our ally, so we sit back and do nothing, letting the situation boil until we have attacks not only on Russian soldiers but civilians as well. If we can't even promote the immutable right of self-rule and democracy inside the borders of our allies with our free trade and friendship, what makes us think we can impose it with bullets upon a people who seem to have been very happy with their evil dictator thankyouverymuch, at least happy enough that they are complacent in resisting thugs who are fighting against both them and Coalition forces?

09.05.2004 18:08:51 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [2]Trackback

Cryptologists have figured out how to reverse-engineer marked-out words in redacted documents. Words to the wise: make sure you redact not only nouns but also their preceeding articles, and use monospaced fonts (which give away only the number of letters, not their more-telling widths).

09.05.2004 17:14:23 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

I'm trying out Electric Shoebox's built-in photo album feature with some random shots I picked from our New York trip a few weeks ago. Please give it a shot and let me know how it works out. In particular, I'm a little concerned with having to run it on port 8080--any firewall issues out there?

Feel free to leave comments on the pictures as well, I'm always looking for a little positive criticism. All photos taken with my Canon Digital Rebel and are released under this Creative Commons license.

Many more photos to come after I make sure the album software (which operates as a web server on my machine) works well. Otherwise, I'll probably use NGallery, though it isn't nearly as convenient since ES is my photo management tool.

09.05.2004 09:59:03 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [3]Trackback

Delanea and I are suckers for high school genre movies. We've seen every nerdy-girl-makes-good, cheerleaders-win-dance, and must-have-girl-before-graduating movie made in the last ten years or so. So tonight we went to see Linsay Lohan's and Tina Fey's new flick "Mean Girls."

If "Ten Things I Hate About You" had you hurling in the aisle and you avoid NBC's Joan like the plague, you may not be the target audience. There are plenty of stereotype characters and obvious turns-of-plot to be annoyed at. If, however, you are into the genre, you should see it. It follows the standard formula (new girl, bad crowd, football love interest, unintentional house party, big mistake, etc.), but has a number of original elements and a few surprises. Tina Fey's character is a bit unconvincing, but everyone else (including Lohan) is great. Good direction and editing, no real slow spots, great costuming, and plenty of funny to go around.

09.05.2004 01:47:26 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [1]Trackback

Ok, I admit it, I'm one of Robert Scoble's 18 regular readers. Usually, his balance between evangelizing for Microsoft and communicating with actual customers is an example to all Microsoft bloggers (and other corporate bloggers).

I was dismayed, however, to read his comments about Mozilla and Longhorn:

As to Mozilla, you guys should talk with us. We're working underneath on the foundation. Longhorn will let you make a new awesome browser that'd blow away what you're doing today. Here's a hint: I'm using Firefox on Longhorn. Works great! But it COULD BE so much better! You don't take advantage of Avalon. You don't take advantage of WinFS. These things are not threats to you. They are platform-level investments we're making for you to use. If you don't use them, I'm sure some other browser will (Opera?) and I'll switch to that.

His "ideas" for "interoperability" between the two smack of insincerity and flame-baiting, and it's frankly not the kind of thing I expect from someone whose job is to build a constructive dialog between the development community (including OSS) and Microsoft's ongoing OS development efforts.

Mozilla Firefox is a cross-platform development effort. It's not a Windows app, and certainly not a Longhorn app. This does not mean that it is developed for the "least common denominator" of OS functionality: on each platform, it provides an interface that is as native as any platform-specific app, including themed widgets in XP and native menus and a "pinstripe" skin in OS X. When the time comes, I'm sure it'll eventually have some optional "Longhornishness" about it. But, in the end, the success of Firefox is in the way that it implements the best of these worlds without oodles of platform-specific code.

I think Scoble understand this. I think he knows that promoting attempts to "enhance" Firefox to use WinFS for metadata storage or to use Avalon for neat flipping/twisting windows is nonsense that is bound to simply raise the ire of the OSS community. His reported comments sound a lot less like the Robert Scoble who used to take Microsoft to task for failing to meet customer needs, and a lot more like the "embrace and extend" Microsoft with which most of us in the geek community (even "share-cropping" .NET developers like me) are uncomfortable.

Microsoft needs the developer community to make Longhorn a success (especially the OSS and hobby-developer innovators), but gloating over glitzy upcoming features in Longhorn is not the best approach. Winning them over is all about attitude. People at Microsoft taking the position of "why don't you just give up on l0s3r Linux/Mac/Win2k/WinXP builds and build a real web browser for a real operating system we're going to release in a few years" is about as silly as the skinny kid asking you to be his friend now so he won't have to kick your butt after he body-builds during summer break.

Longhorn is years away, and promises few features that would make sense in a web browser. Decent adoption will take years after that. Microsft is going to have to face the fact that no self-respecting company is going to restrict their own market to post-Longhorn customers. Few now will venture beyond deprecating Windows 98 or Office 2000 compatibility, and some who went with XP-only apps (e.g., ConstantTime's great app Electric Shoebox) are reneging and working on 98/2000 builds, giving up on XP-only features. In my own work, I can rarely even forego testing in IE 5.5, and our own company has only recently standardized on Office 2000 (we are consultants, so we have to wait for most of our customers to upgrade to prevent backward-compatibility issues with our work product).

Using Office 2003, for example, let me given an illustration of the sort of attitude that would win customer loyalty, improve sales, and build market share. Office 2003 introduced XML schemas that each of its components understand treat natively. Yet, use of these standards in the real world is still at the play-toy level. Why? Because most software developers have no intention of integrating with a version of Office that their customers are not using. This won't be a problem in four or five years, but in the mean time Microsoft spent a lot of dough implementing a feature only fit for the laboratory.

If Microsoft is really interested in increasing Office upgrade sales, they need to build an upgrade path to Office 2003's XML feature. Give developers no excuses to avoid the XML feature by releasing free, transparent import/export for Office 2000 and Office XP, throw it into the next service pack, and even support it in the Office viewers (which also need a serious UI face-lift if Microsoft wants them to actually advertise Office). Doing so means that there will be minimal pain for the end user to add XML support (vs. having to upgrade), giving developers a leg to stand on when they promote Office-compatible XML I/O to their own management. The software developers build the feature. Now, those customers who would not upgrade are not locked out (keeping customers for the software developers), and those who are considering upgrading see a whole slew of apps that have built-in XML support that require no plug-ins.

How does this translate to Longhorn? I'm not sure yet. I do know that few companies will use WinFS/Avalon/XAML support unless there is some available backwards-compatibility with Windows XP. Maybe not full support, but enough to risk using the feature without alienating their entire pre-upgraded customer base. Trying to them promote these features at this point to be integrated into a cross-platform, OSS web browser is laughable.

Robert, if you want to sell Longhorn to developers, don't focus on the fancy flying windows. Don't try to thrill us with the 3D graphics and RSS-compatible toolbars. Don't gloat over a metabase file system you know we won't be able to use for 5-10 years without losing customers. Don't tell us stories about how life will be harder for us because we're going to have to add incompatible Longhorn features to our products.

Instead, find the story that tells us how life will be easier for us under Longhorn. Tell us how Microsoft plans to help us help them. We're dependent on each other: Microsoft needs products that take advantage of what they build, but we need real-world paths to get there without also having to lose half a decade of sales waiting for our customers to catch up. Tell us how Microsoft will improve .NET to give us managed access to every Windows API we could dream to use, and how that won't make our products useless on everything else. How bridges will be built back for WinFS and other features so we can wade in without losing our 2K/XP customers.

Product evangelism is like religious evangelism. It's not enough to tell people the sorry state they are in and how much brighter the world will be once they make the plunge. You have to give them a path, explain the steps, hold their hands, and realize that not everyone will be an instant convert.

09.05.2004 00:52:18 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [2]Trackback
 Samstag, 8. Mai 2004

Weird error that has been happening for about the past week. No hits on Google/Web, only two unreplied posts on Google/Usenet. I hate rebooting for no good reason, is there some way to log out the other XP account from mine (i.e., w/o switching) so I can give it a shot that way?

08.05.2004 05:02:55 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [2]Trackback
 Freitag, 7. Mai 2004

Audio interview with the good professor on an NPR member station on the history of copyrights...

07.05.2004 18:35:37 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

Uhm, I mean, "Survivor and Friends."

I've never been a big fan of "Friends." It came out the year I started college, so I think I missed some sort of sweet spot in the age bracket. The jokes were funny, but in a way that always made me feel a bit guilty: slapsticks and obvious gaffes, but without the tongue-in-cheekedness of "Seinfeld," "Frasier," or "Monty Python."

Last night's episode was more of the same. It had its moments and tidied up every character arc, even that of the venerable table hockey table (a subplot that reminded me of the more gloomy final episode of "Little House on the Prairie."). Even with the nice "surprise endings," though, I had the feeling that they could just have well have had the same final episode five years ago.

"Survivor," on the other hand, is just now reaching a climax this season. I'm still rooting for Rupert, but I'm afraid he completely hosed his only chance at the final two by voting with the "power couple." Rupert probably thinks his chances are even with him and Jenna vs. Rob and Amber, but the egotist jock from Boston is still a jock and he holds the strong upper hand in immunity challenges to come, and Jenna is no one to trust.

07.05.2004 17:33:48 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback
 Donnerstag, 6. Mai 2004

Coke is planning a promotion that involves a Coke can with a built-in cell phone and GPS receiver to let you know you've won and to send the prize patrol to your house.

My immediate thought: how cool would it be for the market to suddenly be swamped with near-free GPS receiver circuitry? Someone needs to reverse-engineer those cans and figure out how to cheaply jig all the important bits into a USB or CF interface and then resell them for a fraction of the cost of current computer-enabled GPS receivers.

Come to think of it, a CF card with a built-in GPS receiver would be an incredibly spiffy invention. Imagine a CF card with just enough firmware to edit JPEGs as they are written to the drive in FAT partitions, adding the appropriate EXIF tags for geolocation. No camera support required. Even editing the JPEGs wouldn't necessarily be required: just have it create a simple file in each folder that has JPEGs, a file that could then be copied easily to the computer and the data merged into the JPEGs at that point using a simple utility.

06.05.2004 16:28:09 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

Some idiot at Gartner says that security-patching is part of the "cost of using Windows":

“The cost of a Windows environment has gone up because enterprises have to install security patches very rapidly, deal with outages caused by secondary problems with these patches, and deploy additional layers of security technology.”
Although he placed some caveats on his numbers, Nicolett said that informal surveys with Gartner clients indicate that simply moving from a no rapid patch deployment capability to an ongoing process that can respond quickly to vulnerabilities raises the cost of using business by about 15 percent.

The problem here isn't the fact that you need to patch: every operating system (including Linux and OS X) requires regular security patches, and Windows has made such patching dirt-easy for years. If your company isn't either pushing patches to users every weekend or requiring them to run Windows Update themselves (and probing for them), you only have yourselves to blame.

Patching is easy and cheap. The real cost is in not doing the right thing. The overwhelming portion of that "15% increase" is the result of poor IT management, either because of ridiculously inefficient integration testing or because of terrible software procurement choices in the first place.

Compare it to owning a fleet of delivery trucks. You know that you will need to change the oil roughly every 3,000 miles. If you build a lock-box around each engine, synchronize all oil changes to occur at the same time (regardless of mileage), and create an oil-change procedure that takes five months of paperwork and meetings to accomplish, you have only yourself to blame for the "cost" of all those engine replacements and oil-changing red tape.

Likewise, if you insist on purchasing or building vehicles that are so sensitive that each new batch of oil requires months of testing lest the slightly-new formula of 10W40 cause an engine to blow up, you are to blame for staking your business on systems that have no robustness, too few internal abstractions, or too many dependencies on cascades of hacks against the current formula.

I would consider it a sign of poor financial management if I walked into an accounting department and saw them still working hard on the 1998 financial statements. I make the same assumption about the CIO of a corporateion when I walk in and see that they are still running Win2kSP1 and unpatched Office 2000 on the desktops, when everyone is "standardized" on MSIE 5.5 (secured only by some old corporate license for Norton AV), and when questions about the .NET Framework for web servers result in blank stares or some long speech about the need for "integration testing" with some other application on the same server.

You can't treat IT as a cost center unless you want it to become one. If you properly categorize IT in your company as an infrastructure asset that requires maintenance, you can have a nice system purring along that stays with the curve of technology that invests its budgets in continuous improvement and productivity. Treat it like a cost center, however, and those little "savings" from ignoring a service pack, shaving down a vendor's budget for robust code, or perpetually delaying an OS upgrade will quickly add up and gain interest that you will have to pay back some day.

06.05.2004 16:14:27 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

Delanea called me yesterday asking me if I could turn on NPR to hear a feature story on "Fresh Air" about Asperger's Syndrome. Alas, I had no radio and our company forbids streaming on its undersized Net connection, so I waited until I got home and was able to find the stories in question on NPR's web site. The first was an interview with Dr. Fred Volkmar, an expert in Asperger's in children, and the second was the story of Michael John Carley, the executive director of GRASP, The Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership.

I've posted before about my suspicions that I may have had a milder form of Asperger's as a child, and the first interview (I have not yet heard the second) confirms both that I probably have it and that it is definitely mild compared to many of his patients. I consider myself lucky to have caught some of the advantages of the genetic wiring without most of the disabling disadvantages.

He also talked a bit about adults with the disorder and I can still see myself there to some degree. I'm terrible with names and faces, often meeting people more than once. I still tend to have all-consuming hobbies and interests and opinions that I prattle on about (making this blog therapy I suppose). I'm still not exactly an athelete, the exception being my hands: I type relatively fast and play both electric bass guitar and piano).

Dr. Volkmar also said that, like with autism, there is a strong genetic link. Looking back, I can see some of the potential traits in my dad as well (milder than my own). The loquacity is definitely there (he's a former pastor/evangelist who still has occassion to travel and preach), as is the propensity for technical matters (he's an accomplished RF engineer). Strange how I haven't thought about that until now, but this being his birthday I guess I was thinking about both at the same time and made the connection.

06.05.2004 08:54:49 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback
 Mittwoch, 5. Mai 2004

GQ has a long article out that discusses Colin Powell's views on the current administration and the possibility of him stepping aside for a second GWB term. Can't say I blame him.

05.05.2004 14:40:03 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

Mono beta 1 is out. This is easily the most important release of any Novell product in the past five years, and it's open source.

05.05.2004 14:19:13 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

All web browsers (IE) that move themselves to the foreground (IE) when a page has finished loading (IE) should drown in their own bits (IE).

I have to use IE for some lame accounting application here at work, and since it is the only time (other than testing web apps and using Windows Update) that I spend in IE, it bugs me to no end when I'm forced to use it and it keeps popping up while I'm dove-tailing in another window.

05.05.2004 13:53:24 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [1]Trackback
 Dienstag, 4. Mai 2004

The fact that gasoline stations charge $0.50 for air and water is just plain ridiculous. There should be a federal law that requires all public gas stations to provide free air and water. It's a public safety issue. Considering the average environmental and aesthetic impact on a neighborhood that comes with your basic petrol-and-mini-mart compared to the jobs created, it's the least they can do.

I lean pretty libertarian, but the normal libertarian argument of "gas stations will always provide free air if that is what the market demands" is plain silly. Few people are willing to boycott a gas station for lack of free air, many may not notice at all until they find themselves underinflated and without coinage. But with no direct feedback, there can be no market adjustment. They'll lose a few angry people who actually came by needing some air, but will never know why and never go out of business because of it. In the meantime, people are trying to get their car some basic emergency attention for air pressure or radiator fluid and having to move dangerously from stations along one exit to the next, increasing the chances of having an overheated engine or a blown tire.

I reached a boiling point this morning when I had to wait in line to break a $20 to fill up a single low tire. Glad I had cash on me--usually I'm a VISA-only guy. I'm not asking for free oil or full service or free car washes, but gas stations are seen as "places of automotive refuge" along our roads, and the basics (bathrooms, winshield cleaner, water, paper towels, and air) should always be available without charge. There's nothing more annoying than having to station-hop for a quick fix, and nothing as preventable.

04.05.2004 10:38:34 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback
 Montag, 3. Mai 2004

I always find cool stuff by following links that commenters leave here... this time around, it was SnapLog, a super-simple, free way to publish a photo blog regardless of your web server. It dynamically generates and publishes the HTML, CSS, and scaled-down images to the FTP server of your choice, you just provide the photos and captions. For digital camera files, it can publish using the embedded camera timestamp or the current date/time. If you are comfy with HTML and CSS, you can create your own templates.

I had some issues getting it to work with my digital camera files, but don't let that stop you from giving it a try...

03.05.2004 22:59:26 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

Get it while it's hot... the best email reader since Outlook. In fact, the only Outlook feature I miss is "red squiggly" spell check, and the only Thunderbird bug of merit is that it still defaults to composing plain text messages/replies in proportional fonts (yuck). Other than that, it's a kick-butt email reader that should be the standard for your virus-prone family and friends still using unpatched/unsecured versions of OE. The new icon is worth the download by itself. Windows installer now included, so no more excuses from the weenie "I don't know what 'C:\Program Files' is" crowd.

I haven't tried the spam-blocking in Thunderbird because I already use the awesome virus/spam pre-scanner MailWasher (the freeware version is sufficient for POP3 mail).

03.05.2004 22:56:08 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

Anyone out there still have occasion to use Access? I switch to the "dark side" of SQL Server about six years ago, so I'm stumped today trying to adjust an Access 2000 report template.

The problem is, I have a report with a number of columns. The first few columns are short, but then there are a few memo fields that often wrap onto other pages. Is there some way to force Access to repeat some of the "short" columns when "long" column(s) force a page break?

The only solution I could find was to group on the first few columns and have headers for each one that are set to repeat, but there appears to be no way to make groups appear beside one another than below.

There's probably a very simple solution to all of this, but I'm just not seeing the forest for the trees. Any help would be appreciated, the Google oracle came back empty-handed.

03.05.2004 14:22:04 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback
 Sonntag, 2. Mai 2004

Cool! Free Winforms components (for personal use). Via Roy Osherove.

02.05.2004 22:45:37 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

Omar Shahine was kind enough to track down my dasBlog problem and correct both my bad content files and patch one of the DLLs. Turns out that an incorrect time zone setting last year was causing some entries and/or comments to be written to the wrong XML files. All fixed now!

dasBlog v1.6 also includes some nifty new features, such as the ability to make sure that category pages include *all* entries. This has been an issue for me lately--trying to find posts I've made before that "dropped off the map." Even Google tricks wouldn't find some of my old posts. The new "Search" feature also rocks.

I need to remember to put in a few requests for the next version:

  • Rename category function
  • Filter out common search engines, spammers, and local hits from emailed referrers and/or referral lists. Probably best as just a set of regex filters.
  • Fix comment URLs (i.e., when people forget "http://").
  • Fix so I can run virtual directories under my dasBlog root without having to copy the dasBlog binaries to the child's bin folder.
02.05.2004 22:02:57 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

Army of One asks for comments about a Vessel of Honour post deriding Rick Warren and his "Purpose-Driven Life" machine as false teaching.

I've criticized PDL, Inc. in the past, so I'm not a fan. However, I would not go as far as to accuse Warren of links to occultism. Rather, I'm disturbed by the the fact that his books filled with trite phrases and shallow theology are found by so many in the church to be "profound" or "life-changing."

I'm not sure if Warren's books are a reflection of the American-dream-theology church today or a cause of it, but I give some grace and lean toward the former. This is the same uneducated American church who gets their theology from the Left Behind books, TBN faith preachers, and the flavor-of-the-day conference or "revival" or "anointed" worship leader.

02.05.2004 12:06:41 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [1]Trackback
 Freitag, 30. April 2004

I think someone got confused by my post yesterday about how even cheap domestic labor benefits all Americans. "Anon" commented saying he/she can't see how a minimum wage worker can add significantly to the economy: they don't generally buy nice houses (if at all), buy new cars, or invent great things.

Many people in low-paying jobs do own cars and rent a place to live. Even at minimum wage. But that's not the point. The question is, is America's economy better off with them than without them?

Take just the point about car ownership, for example. By maintaining a used car, even a low-income family can actually preserve the overall wealth of the country in a way that is better in some ways than buying a new one. Why? Because wealth is that which is created and preserved. If you only count new car sales, you are relying on broken-window economics (e.g., "breaking windows grows the economy by creating jobs for glass workers"). Amenities aside, a used car does the same work as a new car, and a scrapped car is a waste burden. Even environmentally, a well-maintained '90 Honda on the road is better for everyone than an '04 Excursion.

Most workers go beyond mere preservation and add wealth to the economy: they are paid to do something useful, and then they spend or invest that money, allowing others to be paid to do something useful. The same dollar does something useful each time it is spent, buys a little more each time it is spent, and the work product created is not destroyed when the paycheck passes to someone else.

Obviously, not every job is equally "useful" in its constribution to the economy. Ephemeral work product like that produced by cashiers, massage therapists, stock brokers, accountants, attorneys, hair stylists, coal miners, drug dealers, and the like do not produce a net positive gain, they simply fill artificial markets produced by a lack of technology, government need, or temporary customer satisfaction. Some even cause net harm. But that is ok to some degree, because the buck doesn't stop with them, it continues eventually to more productive members of society.

Other jobs can create much more net gain than average. Examples include: inventors, engineers, robots (who are not "paid" for their efforts), computer scientists (who are not "paid" enough ;)), manual laborers, authors, and musicians. As a "fair-trade-not-free-trade" kind of guy, these are the positions I feel strongly about protecting.

But this all goes back to my definition of "wealth": the sum of all "stuff" that has been "done" already that I have the easy opportunity to enjoy without consuming, be it physical infrastructure, durable manufactured goods, medical knowledge, or works of art. Anyone participating in these, regardless of income level, will probably do more for the economy in their lieftime than any Presidential candidate who pontificates about about how he will "create jobs."

30.04.2004 14:03:51 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

The next time you think that FCC ownership rules don't matter, remember back to Sinclair Broadcast Group, who is instructing their ABC affiliates not to air the ABC show "Nightline" on Friday night, stating that honoring our dead soldiers by making them more than a number is "contrary to the public interest." I guess their viewers will have to wait for the some marble memorial on the National Mall in 30 years to place a few names with the war we have gotten ourselves into.

I'm not in support of our decision to go to Iraq (and I say that as a Republican at heart, though with strong libertarian leanings), but how can anyone who supports with war say with a straight face that the American public should not be reminded of the human cost?

I'm not a Ted Koppel fan, but I'm siding with him on this one. I stated here this week (before I heard about the "Nightline" thing) that newspapers should be ashamed of themselves for not making special, nationwide obituary column space for our fallen men and women. I would say the same thing about Afghanistan (an effort I supported) or anywhere else where I do feel our nation's sacrifice is justified and efficacious. Regardless of our reasons when we go to war, we are sending good people off to die and ripping their families apart. Others (over 3,000 so far) come back seriously injured or maimed. Still others come back to find themselves out of a job and/or bankrupt.

Whether we can or should bear the cost is an individual decision for each voter, but why the hell should the entire subject be taboo? If the argument for war in strong enough, I believe the American spirit is strong enough to match it. Anyone who says they "support our troops" and want them to fight but thinks that 30 minutes of opportunity for people to see their last uniformed portraits and hear their names called is "contrary to the public interest" is a hypocrite of the worst sort.

30.04.2004 00:32:10 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [1]Trackback

I'm watching this morning's GMA looking for the NYU library blogger story (a no-show it seems) but I did hear about this cool site that semi-automates the process of coupon-clipping and matching coupons to sales. Here's a link to the story.

Honestly, I don't think this would help us much. Our budget "soft spot" is definitely eating out, not groceries. Saving the stamps at Subway is about as close as I usually get at actually taking advantage of deals.

30.04.2004 00:08:07 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback
 Donnerstag, 29. April 2004

Check this out: the 419 Eater. Maybe I should send in my story and email conversations.

29.04.2004 23:36:55 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

Julien Cheyssial gives his top-10 list of applications to install on a fresh OS. Here's mine:

  1. Windows Update
  2. Mozilla Firefox (with Googlebar plug-in))
  3. Mozilla Thunderbird
  4. IZArc (freeware archiver)
  5. TextPad
  6. Microsoft .NET SDK
  7. SharpReader
  8. SourceGear Vault
  9. SQL 2000 Client Tools
  10. Adobe Photoshop
  11. IrfanView
29.04.2004 21:17:53 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [2]Trackback

Jon Stewart's interview yesterday with Fareed Zakaria is eerily similar to some of my recent   posts. Jon spoke of our problem there being one of the Iraqi people not "having a story" of their own. He made the analogy that if the French had stuck around and written our Constitution for us, perhaps our own story would have ended differently.

Hehe... maybe it's not so good that my political views are similar to the sentiments of the comedian host of a fake news show ;)...

29.04.2004 20:32:47 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [0]Trackback

A county commissioner in Idaho billed Mexico for services (jail and medical assistance) for illegal aliens. Sounds fair enough to me. Of course, if we could implement the Fair Tax, we could pretty much open up the borders to anyone (security concerns aside). People are assets as long as everyone pays for the services they receive.

Legal immigration creates jobs rather than stealing them. Every "cheap" worker coming over and taking a blue collar or minimum wage job will then rent an apartment, buy a house, drive a car, and do a million other things that require new jobs. Because wealth is created through that work, the sum is greater than the parts.

The same can be said for offshoring (surprised I said that, huh?). The problem is, those great new jobs go the same place the cheap jobs go, and for the same reason.

29.04.2004 19:14:35 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Kommentare [2]Trackback