dannyman.toldme.com

You don’t know me, I don’t know you
But stop me on the street,
And I may find a buck or two
To help you to your feet.

You say that you’ve just straightened out
And now’s your time to change
But I have not been in your shoes,
So your words sound kind of strange.

You know a nun down at the church
Who can verify your tale:
You need eight bucks to get to Rockford
Where your fortunes should prevail.

And maybe you could pay me back,
At some undetermined date,
Those few more bucks, that I could spare
Would bode well for your fate.

But I’m a stranger — not your friend,
And you are on your way.
And when you land on Rockford’s soil,
Some friends you’ll have that day.

You are on your way to something new,
I’ve already got my life:
This nice man is preoccupied
By Family, Work and Wife.

Though some change I spare for you
Even when my budget’s broke,
This nice man’s heart can only hold
So many kindred folk.

I may even dig down deeper,
Find some cash for your dire need,
Then smile at you and bid farewell:
Your fate is yours to heed.

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From a note I jotted to myself, titled “Argument Against Empire”

In a world without borders our power can always go somewhere else:
Offshore tax havens
The Silicon Valley of Bangalore

And it comes from somewhere else:
Our mobility comes from foreign oil
Our military superiority comes from advanced research and technology and our intellectual freedom.
Our riches come from the self-interest of capital, which is driven by pragmatic opportunism before national allegiance.
We have no monopoly on these.

In the end we are left with our constitutional traditions
Our republican system of distributed political power
Democracy is an insurance policy against the excesses of abusive government

We can feed our nation without difficulty
And we are secured by two great oceans and two great friendly neighbors

But in a mobile world we are vulnerable to airplanes and anthrax.
We are vulnerable to pandemics and poor public health and food safety systems.

We die more commonly in car crashes, of obesity and diabetes.
We die of cancers from cigarettes.
We die of consumerism.

What I was thinking here, is that the “War on Terror” is misplaced. Terrorism is just one threat of many against which we must remain vigilant. I don’t think that George Bush is a vigilant man. He was caught unprepared on September 11, 2001, and he has been trying to answer for that ever since. I’d rather vote for somebody who is more on the ball, and has a more holistic understanding of what our nation needs. But we get the leaders we deserve. Each of us needs to keep an eye on the world around ourselves, and do what we can to push things in the right directions.

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Three quick links regarding the upcoming presidential election:

1. This Land — A truly hilarious cartoon explaining the contrasts between George Bush and John Kerry.
2. It’s Over, Ralph — An entertaining “Dear John” letter from Barbara Ehrenreich to Ralph Nader … basically, while we all find the man charming, he is starting to get annoying in his ever more marginalized crusade for the White House.
3. JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButImVotingForHimAnyway.com
   — Honorable mention just because the domain name is so silly.

Damn, I spelled Ehrenreich correctly the first time through. I must be getting smart.

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We watched “Malcolm X” recently, and at one point, Malcolm opined that “the only thing I like integrated … is my coffee.”

Which makes me think of my father, who, like me, is a white man. “I like my coffee like I like my women: strong and black!” His wife, from whose womb I did not personally emerge, matches that description, but as he says this, you’ll see him putting cream in his coffee. So, I’m not sure that he actually says that — it might be Uncle Bill, quoting Shaft, or Marcus Garvey, for all I know. Anyway, I think it comes back to integration — strong and black, but all the more satisfying with the injection of some white creaminess.

I got thinking about this topic this morning because I was reading through The Week and I came upon an item from Leonard Pitts, regarding Bill Cosby:

I am sick of worrying what white people think, said Leonard Pitts, in The Miami Herald. So, apparently, is Bill Cosby. At a Rainbow Coalition conference in Chicago, Cosby responded to those who said he’d been airing the African-American community’s dirty laundry. “Let me tell you something,” Cosby said. “Your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it’s calling each other nigger… They can’t read. They can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling, and they’re going nowhere.” Many blacks have been saying as much for years–just not in earshot of white people. Our fear has always been that if we admit to problems, especially serious problems, “bigots will use it to bolster their bigotry.” But Cosby, I think, is right: Standing silent is no longer an option, no matter what white people think.

(more…)

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The music pavillion is outdoors, with a criss-cross metal skeleton surrounding it off of which dangle many speakers, so that you feel, you hear, the same acoustics as an indoor concert hall, but you are outdoors.

And you can see the tall buildings around you, they are minor players. Directly behind the band shell stands the Aon Building, a modest single cousin to New York’s former World Trade Center.

And we sat back and listened, in the middle of a park in the middle of a city in the middle of America, to opera, which sounded as it would in a concert hall, but under a serene blue sky.

You could tell what the desired effect had been – at the dawn of the new millenium, we could sit outdoors and have that experience and feel really damn optimistic about the future in to which we were flowing.

But it wasn’t finished on time. Four years late. Time enough for the tech bubble to burst, for an illegitimate son to take our nation’s throne, for our nation to face the inexplicable hatred and fanaticism that struck us in the face on 9/11, and two half-assed attempts at war and nation building upon two strange foreign cultures.

Four years is enough time to get used to those troubles, and be reminded of the dream we had had at the millenium. The price tag for this serenity? A steep half a billion dollars. I believe that is about our daily burn rate in Iraq. For one hundred billion dollars we can make a half-assed, ignoble attempt to impose democracy on a foreign country that doesn’t seem to want it so awfully bad, or for one hundred billion we can build 200 millenium parks.

Which would bring greater hope to humanity?

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Japan is a country lamentably deficient in delicious cows. And while they may console themselves with delicious morsels of raw fish on rice, there is a sizeable demand for beef, and they are willing to pay top yen for imports.

But for such money, the Japanese want to be damn certain they are importing beef that will not melt their brains. Since Mad Cow disease was detected in the USA’s cattle supply, they have required that any American imports be tested. Does this not seem prudent?

And so, in order to re-gain access to a valuable export market, Creekstone Farms, in the Red State of Kansas, built a laboratory next to their slaughterhouse, and trained employees to conduct tests.

You can read the story here, but the upshot is that the USDA will not allow Creekstone to test their beef. (more…)

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Back in the boom, there were so many ideas. Some were great, some were crap. But for every idea that got seed funding, there were a dozen or possibly a hundred more, that might have been good ideas, that went nowhere. And it wasn’t for lack of money or ambition – there wasn’t enough talent to go around. Salaries and rent and the traffic on 101 skyrocketed, and then it turned out that actually, there just wasn’t enough money to be made off these six-figure salaries in the short-term, and the whole thing skiddered.

I’m a little worried that India may bring down the salaries of technology professionals like me. It may cause short-term unemployment in the United States, but it has so far brought a lot of highly competitive, highly-talented people to the industry. They can work for even lower costs from India, and if their government sees any “IT Dividend” the taxes these people are paying can take a very short trip to the aid of hundreds of millions of some of the poorest people on this planet.

And the next time we get the fever of good ideas, we may find that the talent pool for exploring these great ideas has expanded three-fold, five-fold or more. More great ideas will be brought to us, at more competitive cost, that will be of value to more people, and it will be a global phenomenon. The triumphs of the next technology boom will be enjoyed in places far more exotic than San Jose, California. I say, huzzah!

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I received a $4 check from Washington Mutual, which upon deposit would enroll me in some crazy program with undisclosed fees. I crossed out all the stuff on the back of the check about “By endorsing and depositing this check with Washington Mutual …”

I am depositing this check at my friendly local Washington Mutual ATM, with the following letter. We’ll see what happens.

Dear Washington Mutual,

As a consumer, I have a lot of choices as to where I do my personal
banking. I chose to do my banking with Washington Mutual because you
don’t charge other folks to use your ATMs. I think that is a righteous
policy, and all banks should operate this way.

I recently received the enclosed check for $4.00, which would enroll me
in some program I know nothing about. The check arrived from your
company with no descriptions of the fees you wish to charge me as a
consequence of depositing this check. This is misleading,
bait-and-switch trickery based on some misguided theory that as your
customer, I just might be dumb enough to fall for it.

You insult my intelligence, and my sense of doing the right thing, when
these are the very things that brought me in as a customer in the first
place. This is chutzpah. I return your chutzpah in kind. If this
check is credited to my account without preconditions, I will forgive
your breach of etiquette. If you prefer not to do this, I will keep my
eye out for other banking opportunities.

Thank you for your time and banking services. Thank you for the $4.
Thank you for firing the person who persuaded you to enact this scam.

Sincerely,
-danny

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Another awesome post from ginmar, serving in Iraq. This time, reflections on the concept of wealth, and some hopeful news:

There’s a noticeable difference in the police, in the Iraqi National Guard, in the people on the street. People are noticeably more effusive now; waving enthusiastically, blowing kisses. The biggest difference is in the police and the Iraqi National Guard … the ING is doing things I wouldn’t have imagined being possible, after the past four months. I saw them abandon their posts, and I could understand it, because they’re still poorly-armed, and they don’t have body armor. Some of them are still unarmed. But it sure makes a difference when it’s their own country they’re fighting for, and it shows. Before, the Mahdi Army would attack police stations and the police would run after token resistance. Now they’re fighting back and standing their ground.

There is plenty of dreary truth to temper this optimism — notably, crushing poverty — which ginmar has seen before in Russia, and the fact that the enemy targets civilians. That latter dark cloud seems to indicate a silver lining:

More and more, it’s civilians that the Sadrs and the Zarcawis are aiming at, and civilians don’t have body armor or helmets. Every soldier who dies here is accompanied in death by civilians who were deliberately targeted by either religious fanatics or cold-blooded opportunists who aren’t even Iraqi. And now the Iraqis are taking matters into their own hands.

But where’s the heavy-duty reconstruction? The roads, the bridges, the electricity, the jobs and ultimately the economic stability that helps a newly democratic government survive? She cites Abraham Lincoln in her conclusion, which makes me wonder if Iraq will be more like post-war Georgia and Alabama than post-war Germany and Japan. (Lincoln wanted to spend a great deal on reconstruction, to “bind the nation together” again, but this ambition died with his assassination.)

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I must recommend this New York Times article about Microsoft’s attempt to develop a Google-class search engine. It pokes fun at Microsoft with dry wit. Some highlights:

The new look consists of an empty white screen that loads blissfully quickly, even over dial-up connections, and an empty, neatly centered text box where you’re supposed to type in what you’re looking for. The search page is ad-free and, except for the MSN logo, even devoid of graphics. (On July 4, however, MSN added a waving-flag graphic, an imitation of the way Google’s witty artists dress up its own logo on holidays.) In short, MSN Search couldn’t look more like Google if you photocopied it.

…

Unfortunately, Microsoft calls the separation of advertising an experiment, not a permanent change in policy. It seems to be trying on honesty in the mirror to see if people will find it attractive, rather than realizing that running a principled business is the way to win customers’ trust.

If you read the whole thing through, you’ll discover that Microsoft has a long way to go to achieve its search-engine dominancy.

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I recently installed WordPress, mostly out of curiosity. My web site has evolved over many years from static files, to using stylesheets, and some lightly-templated formatting to facilitate the creation of an RSS feed. While I have maintained a “log” for a few years now, I’ve always been wary of the whole self-important, vapid, “blogging” stuff.

Well, I saw Keith Garner using it, and I liked the idea that it was a rewrite of some previous software, and had a plug-in architecture, so I thought I would try it out. The install was easy enough, and then I got hooked in to the possibility of importing my data from into via an RSS file. There was some wrestling involved to hack the migration script to eat my raw HTML, and a bit more to get my scraping script adapted to output the appropriate HTML via RSS, but lo and behold, everything made it in.

And I got to tweak the look and feel a great deal with the stylesheet, and by editing the index.php directly. It has all the bells and whistles. Like, comments, which I’ve never had before, but a few people have asked for. And then all this gay backtrack stuff and pingback and backflip and blogflop and whatever. Okay, it promised to be easy to install and support all the silly jargon that I don’t care about, personally. Yay.

And for the most part, it has been comfortable. I get to put things in categories. The categories can be organized hierarchically, but any given item can have more than one category. I can maintain a list of links that can be displayed in the side menu bar. No really serious god-awful, show-stopping bugs …

(more…)

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I really really enjoy using Firefox as a web browser. It is a stripped-down, development version of Mozilla, which is what Netscape became. Among the best features of this web browser are tabbed browsing, where you can keep several navigation panes in one window, and click among them by selecting them via tabs at the top of the window. The browser also tends to do a better job at standards compliance than MSIE.

Firefox also has a plug-ins architecture so programmers can add features to the basic web browser, and share them with users who might enjoy those features. I just reviewed an article from Wired News that talks about some of the more popular plug-ins. From reading this article, I have now got BugMeNot and Dictionary Search installed here at work.

Other plug-ins which I use and love:

Tabbrowser Extensions

Gives you more flexibility in managing tabs. With this plug-in, I can middle-click links into new tabs, force web sites that open new windows on me to put those windows into tabs, and configure Firefox to save and reload tab sessions when I exit and re-start the browser. Tabs means fewer windows all over the desktop, and saved tab sessions means I can pick up where I left off with all my web browsing without leaving the computer running at night.

Adblock

You know how pleasing it is to put commercials on mute, or better yet, fast-forward them with the TiVo? Well, the web works the same way. The basic Firefox already has an option to block images by right-clicking on them. With Adblock, you can right-click on an annoying image, and you get a little window asking you to edit the URL, so you can put a * on the filename, and block all ads that match a particular pattern. Some folks just adblock stuff like */ads/* but I only turn ads off when they annoy me. The slickest part might be that you can block stuff like shockwave animations, which normally give you a shockwave menu when right-clicked.

I think I should also give a shout out to Moji, which will someday help me learn Japanese. With the click of a button, you can get a web page set up so that you can hover over words and get their English or Japanese translation. Yayoi was impressed when I showed her.

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