Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/04/lame-segway-adventure/
Best article lead I have read in a very long time:
Back in the good old days, strong men such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey went screaming across the great American highways with heads hopped full of sour mash and benzedrine. They performed lewd acts, taunted the police, harassed the stiffs and produced great art. These days we’re left with four twenty-something geeks traveling country roads at 10 mph with their Segways, iPods and blogs.
Okay, get this. A guy is going to journey across this great land of ours … on a Segway scooter.
That could be a respectible adventure in and of itself, but he’s going to be followed, at ten miles an hour, by three buddies in a “support car” holding 16 backup batteries, and a bunch of toys, merrily blogging their adventures the whole way through. The Register continues to pound out great copy:
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were also said to have debated the use of text messaging on their trip across the US. In the end, however, they decided that a fridge full of acid-laced orange juice would be a more profound use of technology. For Kerouac, there was but a typewriter, gallons of red wine and meth.
(more…)
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/03/bush-humble/
Jon Roma got me thinking, by quoting a speech from Senator Robert Byrd:
We are at a dangerous time in our Republic. The Constitution — the very foundation of this great country — is under attack by a presidency that is bent upon secrecy, that has to be dragged kicking and screaming to answer questions, and that follows a path of utter recklessness. Its policies have changed the face of America around the globe from that of a giant peacemaker to that of a schoolyard bully. People who once declared strong allegiance with America now question our purpose.
I supported the war. A lot of that is because the Middle East has been dangerously stuck in the past, and the few Iraqis I’ve met all seemed seriously haunted by Saddam Hussein, and the unfinished Gulf War in 1991, when they thought “liberation” may have been at hand. I even defended the distasteful way that Bush went about starting the war — by being a unilateralist bully — because we have had a tendancy to invade other countries, throughout our history, whenever we found it politically convenient, and I don’t see this changing any time soon. The “benefit” is that Americans and those in other countries who love America are reminded that, despite our martyrdom on 9/11, we are not perfect — we are a reckless, arrogant people, and there should be some wariness in dealings with America. (more…)
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/03/hopelessly-bored/
From The John Kerry Loyalty Quiz:
Your score is 9 on a scale of 1 to 10. You are a pure, unabashed, die-hard John Kerry supporter. Nothing would give you greater pleasure than seeing Kerry run Bush and Cheney out of the White House, except maybe seeing them dragged away in handcuffs.
From The George W. Bush Loyalty Quiz:
Your score is 0 on a scale of 1 to 10. You hate Bush with a writhing passion. You think he is an idiot, a liar, and a warmonger who has been a miserable failure as president. Nothing would give you greater pleasure than seeing him run out of the White House, except maybe seeing him dragged away in handcuffs.
Zero on a scale of one to ten!? I am truly an underachiever when it comes to false patriotism!
Thanks for the link, Chip Taylor!
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/30/president-kerry/
You know, it started rough, but John Kerry gave a great speech last night. He stuck it to the President and his cronies, he decried Corporate Welfare, and he looked like a President, which should hopefully make it easier for non-Democrats to put him in the White House.
I don’t know if John Kerry gets the credit for this, or if it was the lack of sleep the night before, but I, for one, slept better after the speech last night.
Nobody is voting for Nader any more. Kerry will win, and he will make our nation better.
I am disappointed that the networks only covered the speech, and not all the great stuff from the hour before. His daughters gave two awesome speechs about their daddy. And the stuff with the Veterans is great. A “Band of Brothers” indeed — I’ve read this elsewhere, but Kerry is a man who has earned the trust of many through a life of honest hard work. He should be our President!
www.JohnKerry.com
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/28/john-kerry-timelord/
I just received a bulk mailing from the Democratic National Committee, designed to look like some express courier message. Yayoi received one as well. They each had an identical “package tracking number” printed on the front, and computer-generated blue-pen “handwriting.”
It is from John Kerry:
Dear Fellow Democrat,
I am rushing this message to you just hours after accepting the Democratic nomination.
That’s really impressive, considering that I received it via the United States Postal Service two days before he is scheduled to accept the Democratic nomination.
You may already be a winner!
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/21/the-war-on-ambiguity/
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.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/20/three-quick-links/
Three quick links regarding the upcoming presidential election:
- This Land — A truly hilarious cartoon explaining the contrasts between George Bush and John Kerry.
- 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.
- 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.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/19/i-like-my-coffee/
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…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/15/usda-mad-cows/
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…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/12/yay-india/
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!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/09/washington-mutual/
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
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/08/msn-imitates-google/
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.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/07/wordpress-first-impressions/
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…)
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/07/wired-news-building-a-better-mozilla/
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.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/22/can-he-handle-presidentwhitehousecov/
I noticed that e-mails from the Kerry campaign are consistently quarantined to my Spam folder. So I forwarded them a sample and gave them some suggestions for being less spammy. They responded promptly:
Dear Friend,
Thank you for attempting to send a message to the John Kerry Campaign. To better handle and manage our email volume, everyone must now use the new web form reached by clicking the link below: http://www.johnkerry.com/contact/contact.php
This does not inspire confidence …
… but I’m already in for $100, so I went to the web site and suggested they spend some of it on better IT.
Hrmmm, no auto-response from BushCheney04@GeorgeWBush.com. I’ll let ya know if I get anything back from the pachyderms.
And, I’m sorry to report, that Ralph Nader’s website has only a form, and no e-mail link that I can find. You’d think a populist …
/danny
1 Comment
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