The Giants’ second-stringers beat the Patriots last night, 19-14.

From ABC News:

NYC Schools Eye Math Tests for Kindergartners

The city is asking public school principals to consider giving math tests to kindergartners, a proposal that comes amid debate over the growing use of standardized tests nationwide.

The experiment could involve tests as long as 90 minutes

I challenge them to give a bunch of five and six year olds a 90-minute test and get any useful information out of it. There’s a reason Spongebob episodes are 11 minutes long, folks.

So tell me, when did “social network” become simply a synonym for “Web site with message boards”?

I think I mentioned these folks before, but it’s worth another shout out. I needed toner for my laser printer and (for reasons I can’t recall) I found TonerRefillKits out of the huge list of places. The first time I used ‘em, I loved ‘em — good price, and honestly clear instructions. (Whomever wrote them is clearly a writer, not “the guy who knows English as a second language instead of a third or fourth.)

Plus, you get a bag of M&Ms. (Some kits require a three-minute wait, so TRK provides a timer and the M&Ms to munch while you wait.) And this time I got a flashlight keyring, too. Plus the owner’s name is John Galt, which adds at least a couple of cool points.

And no, I’m not paid or even asked to say these things. I just really like this company.

Yesterday I finally finished the latest incarnation of the perfect computer desk. (Perfect for me, anyway.) I still have a few final touches to add — a hole for the monitor and speaker cables, for example — but that’s it.

Computer tables are tough. By that I mean that every time I think I have the right one, I realize that there’s something not quite right. When I got a flat panel, suddenly my old desk was too deep. When I shrunk it, I realized that I missed having the extra space.

Anyway, my latest, best desk:

I knew from experience that a height of about 26 to 27 inches works best for me. Adding a keyboard drawer is expensive — a good one goes for $300. So I might as well have the whole desk at a convenient height and simply put the monitor on a riser. It works great.

(In contrast, my hands get sore after typing in the office, because the desk is way too high and the chair doesn’t rise enough to compensate. I see a request for a keyboard drawer in my future.)

So I took four 2×4s for legs, put crosspieces for stability, and simply laid the top on it. It’s not a rectangle; I learned from work that I like a bit of an L shape to have some stuff right next to me.

The top is a single sheet of MDF (medium-density fiberboard), which is darned tough. It’s 60 inches wide (the biggest that could fit in my office at home) and 32 inches deep for the most part — the L part is 48 inches. Plenty of space.

I cut it to shape (no easy task — that sucker is heavy), routed the front edge with a nice curve, and painted it with a heavy-duty enamel.

In other words, it’s pretty simple: Four legs, horizontal braces, a solid top. But what’s important is that it’s the right height and size for me. Fancy computer desks never did it for me, and with the exception of wanting an L shape, this one was incredibly easy to make. (If I wanted a rectangle, Lowe’s would have cut the top to size for me right there, and all I’d need to do is assemble it.)

Now I just need to use it for a bit and figure out the missing things — that hole for the cables, for example. And then it’ll be perfect… until it’s not.

Craigslist is, for the most part, great. I’ve gotten work through it, sold things, bought things — just like a lot of people.

But there’s also a huge downside to it, as I learned yesterday (and again today).

Craiglist is self-policing, meaning that other users — regular folks, not designated admins — are the ones who can remove a post. In theory, it takes more than one person to cause a post to be taken down, but in reality it’s just a matter of having multiple logins.

In other words, your ad can be removed for any reason whatsoever, and you won’t even be told what that reason is. (That’s true even though a flagger has to choose from three options: miscategorized, prohibited, and spam/overpost. You’re not told which yours fell under.)

You have to post to a forum for discussing it, where people will speculate.

But that’s all it is: speculation. There’s no way to know. And, in fact, there are people who go around flagging posts just for the hell of it. In one case I know of, one person with multiple logins is removing every Craigslist ad posted by her former employer.

Here’s the ad I posted that was “flagged and removed” twice:

Here’s the deal: We publish a bi-monthly professional magazine dealing with the real estate industry that goes to about 40,000 people across Virginia. Every issue has one or two feature stories.

I’m looking for reporters to help create them.

That means calling folks across the state (99 percent of whom will be extremely happy to talk with you, which is cool), interviewing them, and organizing their comments into a coherent story.

Note that I said reporters, not writers. I’d love it if you were a great writer, but what’s most important to me — right now — is the reporting side. That’s because the mag is being heavily edited (or edited heavily) as we change styles. No point having you spend time writing if it’s gonna be rewritten.

Eventually I hope to find the perfect writer(s) with the perfect style, but for now I’d be happy with a good reporter or two.

The specifics:

For each story (one or possibly two every other month), I’ll give you the topic and we’ll talk about possible angles for the story. Yes, I definitely want your input.

I’ll give you some good contacts, and you’ll need to find others (e.g., “Call the National Association of Such-and-Such and get them to explain this”).

Then you go forth and interview three to eight people and chat with them for, of, 15 or 20 minutes each.

We pay $300 to $400 depending on the complexity and the number of calls (and, of course, we’d set the price for each piece ahead of time). No, you won’t make a living doing this, but it’s a nice bit of petty cash for not a huge amount of work. And it could even end up being a regular gig.

You need to know what makes a story interesting and who can help you do that. You need to be articulate, have a great phone and e-mail presence, a sense of humor, know how to interview people, and be able to write it all up. And, of course, you need to show me — writing samples, résumé, etc.

If you have experience in real estate or financial services, that’s great but certainly not required.
All that said, if you’re interested or have questions, let me know!

Why was it removed? One person didn’t like my opening phrase, “Here’s the deal” and said that was probably why. Another didn’t like the tone of the ad. Another thought it was too wordy.

In other words, ads will disappear from Craigslist because people don’t like a phrase you use or your tone of voice. We’re not talking about writing something offensive; we’re talking about “I would have used a different tone.”

Wow.

One person on the ‘discuss why your ad was deleted’ forum sent me a nasty note calling me an arrogant SOB who didn’t deserve any responses. (This may or may not be true. But if you don’t like the tone of an ad, how about, er, not answering it?

Nope. On Craigslist, if you don’t like the ad for any reason or no reason you can flag it for removal. You don’t have to give your name, don’t have to give a reason. Just … because.

Twice this has happened with the same ad. I’m gonna keep posting it, but I think I might just start flagging ads at random — become part of the problem. Because it really needs to become a big enough issue to be fixed.

John McCain had a bad weekend. He was caught effectively cheating at the civil forum at Saddleback Church on Saturday evening. He had promised to be in a “cone of silence” while Obama was asked questions by Rick Warren, so he wouldn’t know what they were ahead of time. Instead, he apparently was able to listen in to the point that he blurted out answers to the questions before Warren finished asking them.

From the Times story:

The matter is of interest because Mr. McCain, who followed Mr. Obama’s hourlong appearance in the forum, was asked virtually the same questions as Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain’s performance was well received, raising speculation among some viewers, especially supporters of Mr. Obama, that he was not as isolated during the Obama interview as Mr. Warren implied.

That’s called lying. And cheating.

Mr. Warren started by asking Mr. McCain, “Now, my first question: Was the cone of silence comfortable that you were in just now?”

Mr. McCain deadpanned, “I was trying to hear through the wall.”

In fact, McCain was being driven in his car at the time, where, yes, he had access to Obama’s Q&A session.

Then, something that goes more to his character: McCain was caught plagiarizing a story that — he claimed — happened while he was a POW. Turns out it never did; he stole the idea from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Yep, that’s right: McCain not only got caught flat-out lying about what happened to him, he stole the idea from someone else.

Solzhenitsyn’s experience:

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.
(Luke Veronis, “The Sign of the Cross”; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.)

What McCain wrote in Faith of my Fathers and repeated last night

One Christmas, a few months after the gun guard had inexplicably come to my assistance during my long night in the interrogation room, I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw him approach me. He walked up and stood silently next to me. Again, he didn’t smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground in front of us. After a few moments had passed he rather nonchalantly used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood wordlessly looking at the cross until, after a minute or two, he rubbed it out and walked away.

In one version of McCain’s story, the guard used his foot. In another version, he uses a stick. And, despite having spoken and written about his experience in prison many times since he returned from Vietnam, the first time the “cross in the dirt” story made its appearance was in 1999, when Faith of My Fathers was published as part of his presidential campaign.

Oh, and McCain has said he’s a big Solzhenitsyn fan.

Amazing, this guy.

Imagine you bought a computer from a major computer maker — let’s call it “GateDellHPWay.” And imagine you put your stuff on it — software you bought, or downloaded, or wrote.

And imagine that the people at GateDellHPWay decided it didn’t like some the software you put on that computer. How did it know? Well, you have an Internet connection, right? So every now and again, without telling you, your computer contacted GateDellHPWay and told it what you had installed.

Well, for whatever reason, something you installed was put on the GateDellHPWay “blacklist.” So the company reached through the Internet and deleted it from your computer.

I suspect you’d be annoyed — downright furious, really — not only that it happened, but that your computer was designed that way in the first place. You bought it, right? You can do whatever you want with it, right?

Well, the scenario I described is real. It’s what you get if you buy an iPhone.

Yep, the iPhone regularly contacts the Apple temple HQ, checks a list of blacklisted software, and if you dared to install any on the device you bought, Apple deletes it.

The logic — and apparently fanboys are buying into this — is that Apple must protect the purity of the product. It simply can’t allow unauthorized software to run on your — er, its — precious machines.

‘We provide all the software you need,’ is the logic. ‘We are Apple. We know what’s best.’

Check out this quote from Jobs:

However, Mr Jobs insisted that the so-called ‘kill switch’ was there as a precaution, rather than a function that was routinely used.

“Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” said Mr Jobs.

Wait, what? It would be irresponsible not to be able to delete your users’ software? Are you kidding me?

I wonder if such a system exists on Apple desktop and laptop computers. It would seem so, based on Jobs’s logic.

Sorry, Steve. If I buy it, I want to choose what to run on it. Which is why, when I get a smartphone, I’m going for one that’s based on the Android platform. Anyone can write software for it (without getting blessings from the temple), and users can run whatever they like. Just like, you know, a real computer.

Makes me think of the old Soviet Union. “Why would be need a choice of cars, Comrade? If the State says this is good enough, I say it’s good enough. Why would anyone want anything else?”

I am a keyboard snob. I’m at it so often — writing for work, blogging, coding, gaming, etc. — that it really has to be perfect. (I’m a mouse snob too, but not quite as much.)

Many people, including me, consider the old IBM “Type-M” keyboard to be the pinnacle of achievement, keyboard-wise. They’re the “old-fashioned” clicky keyboards that can wake the dead if you’re touch-typing. They feel great and also weigh a ton (more than five pounds!), making them a useful weapon should the need ever arise.

But my wife complained about the noise. She prefers a silent computing environment. I went in search of something else.

One I really liked, at first, is the Saitek Eclipse II. It’s also solid, but much quieter, and the backlit keys come in more handy than I would have thought. But the key travel on the Eclipse II isn’t quite enough for a writer. It’s perfect for gaming, but I need something with a little more key travel.

I thought I found the perfect keyboard with the Keytronic EO3600 line. They look like the old IBM keyboards, but they’re quieter. And they have the same nice key travel but don’t require all the force the IBMs did. (Even nicer, the keys you hit with your pinkies need less force than those you hit with your index and middle fingers.)

One problem with the Keytronic: They’re built like crap. I’ve had keyboards for years without a problem, but one of the two Keytronics I got started flaking out after about 18 months. The NumLock and CapsLock lights became intermittent, and it developed a slight warp so that it began rattling on the tabletop. (Now they come with a two-year warranty, but mine is out of that phase.)

Thus began the search for the next, best keyboard. I considered another Keytronic, but something else occurred to me: The mouse was a long way away.

Huh? What I mean, is, as someone who uses both they keyboard and the mouse an awful lot, the hand travel from ASDF JKL; to the mouse becomes noticeable and annoying after a while. I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts (more than most people, I’ve come to understand), but you can’t quite use a keyboard for everything.

So, I thought, what about an integrated trackball?  Not one over the number pad, but within the keyboard like some laptops? That way I wouldn’t have to reach over for the mouse all the time….

Bottom line, I went for a Unicomp Endurapro. It’s got a similar (if not identical) feel to the old Model Ms, but it adds Windows keys (which I use often enough, especially Windows-M to minimize everything) and that Trackpoint thingy that can occasionally replace the mouse — e.g., when I’m on a roll.

Oh, and it’s black and gray, so it looks modern enough not to get snide comments from my office mates if I bring it into work.