This page features every post I write, and is dedicated to Andrew Ho.
Okay, if you have any interest in Microsoft and/or European anti-trust regulation, check out this New York Times article. It gets good on page two.
The background is that Europe has told Microsoft that they will need to offer a version of Windows that does not include Media Player, so that computer vendors can sell a version of Windows with competing media playing software.
A colleague at Microsoft ranted yesterday that this was a massive imposition, because after removing Media Player, they would have to test Windows, which would take months of time and thousands of employees. This complaint seemed strange to me, as Microsoft is frequently making revisions to its operating system, and distributing these changes via Windows Update, so, it surely has some mechanism for testing Windows? And it is not like this need to change Windows is entirely unanticipated, as they’ve been working towards it for five years.
Anyway, to the first quote:
“Microsoft … said the commission’s ruling would stifle innovation and deprive consumers of choices.”
What charms me about Microsoft is that any threat of government regulation will always deprive them of the ability to innovate. (They don’t really seem to do much “innovation” themselves anyway, they mostly just copy or co-opt the innovations of others.) In this case, they are being compelled to innovate, by changing their software so as to offer consumers more choices.
I wonder if whomever issued their objection stopped to consider whether they needed a more innovative objection? If only there were other consumer software monopolies haunted by the specter of government regulation after which Microsoft could model innovative rebuttals to the specter of government regulation!
Oh, but it gets better. Next quote:
“Once regulators get their bit in their teeth and realize they can regulate, they may not stop with the bad actors,” said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley research firm.
Yes … once regulators figure out that they can regulate, they might start regulating! The implications of this could be spectacularly regulatory!
/danny
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I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Michael Newdow will be pleading his case before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, explaining why those two little words have no place in our nation’s “Pledge of Allegiance”. I hope his arguments prove convincing. We’ll see how our government works. You can read more about what’s up at the New York Times.
/danny
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I try to be as Theist-positive as I can. But that “under God” stuff has always bugged the heck outta me, and I’ve been omitting those two words from my Pledge since the sixth grade. The money can trust in God all it wants, because, really, money is an act of faith anyway, and I don’t pledge allegiance to it, but my allegiance to my country should not require an appeal to the Invisible Man in the Sky to be sincere.
/danny
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So, my car is now compliant with Chicago emissions. I’ve been neglecting to take it in since the last time it failed, after which I got it tuned up, and started working full-time, with a long-ass commute of about thirty feet. Yeah, well, it failed the second test, at which point they gave me a booklet with a list of shops in Chicago, sorted by their success rate at fixing emissions problems. Since I’m in a new neighborhood, I took the beast over by Car X. Now, normally I’m a bit wary of big chain stores when there’s plenty of greasy guys around willing to do a perfectly good job in a local garage, where the money will stay in the city, and not be siphoned off to some offshore, or at least suburban tax shelter. Yeah, well, the guy figured out my catalytic converters were shot – I mean, they were fifteen years old, right? So, for $475 those were replaced. And it was a slow last Friday over there so you know what they took it by the emissions testing station and passed me through the test!
I am in love. They fixed my car, and they saved me a boat load of time. Car X rocks!
What else? Ah, you may have noticed this funny little strip on the right-hand side of my home page, of little photos. Check it out — You can leave comments and stuff, and I’ll read them. And it is easy for me as sending an e-mail. Hopefully this adds a touch of … whatever.
Other fun things, in case you need to waste some time:
The New York Times has an an article with a plainly funny graph showing optimism, to the point of “no, wait, you guys are so obviously full of Bullsh!t” in the Bush administration’s job projection figures. Every year the administration’s graph goes stright up at a steep angle. Every year the reality graph goes down at a very soft angle, and every year the administration has to move their steep line over to the right …
A Moveon web site called Daily Mislead points out that Bushs’ new campaign ads, which I haven’t seen, which feature the image of firefighters carrying a body bag from Ground Zero, are all the more hypocritical given the administration’s ban on filming body bags returning from the War on Terror.
But it is not all grim, depressing politics. The New York Times has a fun, insightful article on pickpocketing research. A study posted by BBC reports that teens who take a vow of celibacy have less sex, but the same rate of STDs as their morally loose peers, in large part because they are not prepared, with condoms, when they do succumb to their hormones. I heard an NPR story about the abstinence curriculum that schools do in many places, and the main reason to be “abstain” is to avoid STDs … but … well … I don’t know, this just sort of shoots that side of the argument all to heck. Maybe we’re better off with the advice “you needn’t rush into a sexual relationship, but if you’re going to do it, get a damned condom first! Promise me you’ll carry a condom with you, just in case your sex drive overpowers your good judgement! Thanks!”
What else? It’s been some windy times in Illinois. In fact, back in Champaign-Urbana, an MTD bus took a fall off a bridge. That’s some wind! It turns out that eBay has been spanked by New York State because PayPal plays a little too fast and loose with “the truth.” Silly PayPal! Bad PayPal! Hooray for Eliot Spitzer!
And, for your grinning pleasure, a piece on how Californians see United States geography.
Alright.
Last, but not least, I was really productive at work yesterday. (7MB AVI file, but the paper shredder is fine.)
/danny
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Happy Birthday, Sister Girl!
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Geese and ducks on the ice at Indian Boundary Park, February 29, 2004. The ice is melting, but the water fowl are still on “solid ground”. Note that many of the ducks are standing on one foot, because the ice is cold. A few others are huddled with their heads tucked closely against their bodies.
Many of the fish — carp — were dead, or moving very sluggishly where the ice had melted. Some seemed dead but were in fact still moving very slowly, their metabolisms drastically reduced to survive the winter. The weather’s been very nice in Chicago lately, after what has qualified as a genuine winter, with oppressive cold, and snow on the ground for months at a time.
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So, I’m told to send an e-mail to a third party. Microsoft Outlook conveniently highlights the e-mail address, so that I could click on it to end an e-mail. But the e-mail I’m sending is actually based on another e-mail, so I’d rather forward.
So, I right-click. Can I add the e-mail to my contacts list? No. So, I pull up contacts window. I put the guy’s first name in and drag the e-mail hyperlink to the e-mail address field. Close and some annoying dialogue pops up and I click it away without reading it because I don’t care what silly advice Outlook has for me.
So, I can not find the contact in my contacts list. Okay … I keep clicking away trying to make the search work right because I tell it to search all lists but it keeps switching to “search global list” but whatever.
So, instead of searching for the contact I guess I screwed up when I entered merely a first name and e-mail address, I go and drag the little blue e-mail address to the To: field in my message composer. Edit edit edit proof-read double-check contacts hey … why is the To: address prefixed with mailto:? Edit that …
Edit that … I mean … each time I try to edit the To: address it only let’s me select all or none. I can not edit an e-mail address. Can I right-click on it? Yes, but unlike, say, the file browser, there is no “rename” or other “edit the fucking e-mail address option.”
Stuff like this drives me crazy. Why do we put all these features in the software when none of the features are actually useful, and we actually have less ability to do things than we did in the evil bad old days when software was “hard” to use?
So, I delete the mailto: address, highlight the blue blob from the other message, right-click, and paste a well-formed e-mail address into the To: field.
Sigh.
I just have to rant sometimes. I’m usually a very easy-going guy, but over-engineering that interferes with my ability to do simple and obvious things I take for granted, like editing an e-mail address … that stuff makes me really really irritated. Dang.
/danny
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I read something on the BBC today that gave me hope. You know how John Kerry and John Edwards are scared to say anything nice about gay marriage because the Republicans would use it as a wedge issue to deny Democrats the bigotry vote? Well, the thing I read made the point that if Bush is going to come out, so to speak, on the Straight Marriage Amendment, then the rumors that he could replace Evil Dick Cheney with Gay-Friendly Hero of 9/11 Rudy Guliani were entirely pointless. And it occurred to me that, in this scenario, Gay Marriage could cost the Republicans the election.
It is hard to hold a big tent up when your specialty is driving wedges.
Yeah, well, I should get back to work. A little bit of reading for those interested:
If anyone is doing some sort of pink pride parade, I’m down with that.
If people want to love each other, I’m down with that.
/danny
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I was feeling ill just before New Years and went to bed early on New Years Eve, but Yayoi dragged me out of my dreamy reverie to watch the ball drop. I saw the throngs of happy people cheering on a cold Winter’s day in New York City, and I felt unusually emotional about it. I let it go … let it go, and figured that what it was is that it has been a pretty strange few years, for the country and for my own self. Strikes and gutters. World travel and layoffs. Lovers and heart breaks. Progress progress always progress. And nothing seems to symbolize a victory over the things that dog us more than a throng of New Yorkers packing in to Times Square to boldly shout that they are alive and happy. Ah, what a tasty target they must be … but they don’t care. They’re proud, and confident, and even if times are a bit rough they believe that tomorrow ought to be better. Fates bless ‘m!
Some time on the first I managed to pull this one out, to the tune of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s _Woodstock_:
Well I came upon a child of God
He was walkin along the road
And I asked him “Tell me where are you goin?”
This he told me,
Said “I’m goin down to NYC,
Gonna join with the American way
Got to get back the people,
and set my soul free.”
We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the Apple
“Well then can I walk beside you?
I have come to lose the fog
And I feel myself a cog in something turnin
And may be all the time that we live in
Or maybe too much CNN
But I dont know who I am,
and life is for learnin.”
We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the Apple
By the time we got to Times Square
We were over one million strong
And everywhere was the sound and the celebration
And I dreamed I saw those death-bombin planes
And those buildings in the sky
Turning in to butterflys
above our nation
We are stardust
We are golden
And we all die Americans
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the Apple
/danny
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Thank you, NTK:
More cheap hacks to counter-impress smug MacOS X owners.
Yes, Panther's "Preview" app is a super-fast PDF viewer that's
a lot snappier than Adobe "OMFG! A vector! How do I draw
that??!!" Acrobat. Close the gap of shame (and stop yourself
eating your own fist off waiting for Acrobat to start up) by
running ADOBE READER SPEED-UP, a eensy-weensy Windows
program that deletes a bunch of Adobe plugins that you don't
care about. Voila: spend your spare time reading your doc
rather than watching Adobe go "Loading dumb-ass marketing
rubbish/lousy DRM feature" for a thousand hours.
http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index.php
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He will not be our next President, but he has already helped change our country. Put best by Robert Menendez, House Democratic Caucus chair, via Thomas Ferraro, of Reuters:
“He gave a stiff spine to a lot of Democrats.”
Menendez said he and other members of Congress who had backed Dean had a conference telephone call with him shortly before his speech in Burlington. Dean first disclosed his plans to drop out about an hour earlier in an online message to backers.
Menendez said Dean told him many of his supporters backed consumer advocate Ralph Nader in the 2000 White House race.
Democrats with stiff spines, who oppose George Bush instead of appeasing George Bush. Bringing disaffected liberals who voted Green in the last election. I’d like to think that even though he’s not the candidate, he has already helped his party to win this year’s election.
I’m still disappointed that he didn’t get anywhere.
/danny
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Cleaning out the e-mail box. A few gems:
- Which Dysfunctional Care Bear Are You? — A link to my sister’s blog. She’s Bondage Bear and I’m Gay Bear. That’s what we get for disdaining the Christian Coalition.
- Moveon.org are up to … advocating censure of President Bush for misleading us into War. Hey, it’s not like he lied about a blowjob or something pernicious like that!
- Let us say your local municipal or state website is disinterested in helping you register to vote. Franchisement is such a pain in the ass! Okay, well, You can visit rockthevote.com and get yours squared away. They asked me questions and generated a PDF file for me to print out and mail in.
- Billed as “Yet Another Mirror” — A Crazed Lunatic Prevaricator — I’m told that the P word fits and “sounds a bit fancier than ‘liar’.”
- Ever had to send a test message to a mail server without relying on sendmail and/or DNS, but couldn’t recall the SMTP commands? Yeah, I hacked up a little script to take care of that for me.
- Does your Windows box maybe have one of the many virii that have been ravaging the Internet the past few weeks, but you’re too lazy to install a danged virus scanner? Well, drop in on Trend Micro and they can help you clean your hard drive up quick and free.
And then, I share with you a bit of my childhood that I typed to another list . . .
The song on my schoolbus went like this:
I was down at the bar
Tryin’ to pick up some chick
But none of the girls were good to go
So I said “Hey what’s wrong [with my dick]?”
I looked over down
At the other side of the cantina
I asked the guy why you so fly?
He said “I’m funky Daniel Howard!”
-d
My factual lack of funk in those days had a profound impact on the gifted, bored children I rode the schoolbus to and from the magnet school every day. By the way, some of you get excited because I’ve dated quite a few Asian girls what’s my strange fetish from? Heck if I know — I don’t really worry about these things — but since I mention many a long hour of my adolescence spent aboard the schoolbus, I will note that a very cute Korean-American girl blossomed before my eyes on a daily basis over a few years, a couple hours a day. I shall always have fond memories of that young lady, yes indeed.
See, we live at the far north end of the city. My grammar school was downtown. We were the first to board in the morning, and the last to alight in the evening. About an hour each way. Those were long hours indeed. Confessions of lab rat.
On that note . . . BADGER BADGER BADGER BADGER ! ! !
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