How low can you go? I’ll tell you. On USA Today’s home page is a box titled “In memory: Lives we lost this year.” Whose picture is in it?
Anna Frakking Nicole Smith.
Anna Nicole Smith?That’swho they choose to represent who died in 2007? Are they out of their minds? Of all the people who died this year, the site features a porn star?
ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
You know who was more important than a former Playboy bunny?
Boris Yeltsin, Lady Bird Johnson, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Marcel Marceau, Luciano Pavarotti, Mr. Wizard, Evel Knievel, Merv Griffin, Don Ho, Liz Claiborne, and Joey Bishop.
You know who else was more important than that (literally) self-inflated whore? Yvonne De Carlo (who played Lily Munster), Jerry Falwell (who preached hatred and intolerance to millions), Vincent DeDomenico (the inventor of Rice-A-Roni) and Mr. Frakking Whipple.
Someone over at USAT needs to gain just a teeny bit of godsdamn perspective. Sheesh.
* * *
Addendum: I held out a teeny bit of hope that the photo on the home page rotated through the list of those who died, but nope. It’s all Anna.
As trouble continues to brew in Pakistan, you might be interested in the whereabouts of President Bush. He’s remaining in Crawford, Tex., continuing his month-long vacation.
Some of you regulars (the five or six of you) may have noticed that I ran out of bandwidth the other day until I paid the good folks at TotalChoiceHosting for some extra gigs. What you didn’t see was that I was getting bandwidth warnings other times, but I was able add some before it ran out.
OK, *I* like this blog, but I couldn’t imagine it was that popular. What was the deal?
Finally, I found it. Kittens. Damned kittens. That one blog post was in the top ten when you did a Google images search on “kittens.” And naturally people were clicking to view the full-sized images.
So I downloaded them all and saw they were saved as high-quality (Photoshop #12) JPEGs. I resaved them as lower-quality pics, which were a fraction of the size and looked almost as good. Bandwidth problem solved.
And then I realized, “I own a lot of domains!” So I moved the images over to whizkid.com, which isn’t using nearly its bandwidth quota. Bandwidth problem solved.
I decided to give the other top-of-the-popularity-list Linux distro a shot — that’d be PCLinuxOS, which I used once before and remember liking. This time, though, Xubuntu struck me as a much better option.
The word Linux is synonymous with choice. And that is exactly what the hard working developers at PCLinuxOS have provided. For each task, be it graphics manipulation, chatting or audio & video, there are at least 2 choices of software and in most cases, more than two.
The rest of that review goes on in a similar vein. It’s the PC Magazine effect — the (incorrect) idea that more features means a better product. In fact, unless you want or need all those features, the opposite is true.
When I installed PCLinuxOS and glanced through the applications menu (akin to Windows’ Start button), I was overwhelmed. It wasn’t just because there were so many choices, but because I had no clue A) What some of the things did, and B) Which of the many choices was the best.
In Windows, for example, it’s pretty obvious what Notepad and WordPad do based on their names. But here I was stumped. K3B and GnomeBaker? (They’re disk-burning apps.) Kontact is obvious, but Kopete?
Granted, you could make the same argument about a lot of Window software. "Excel" doesn’t exactly scream "spreadsheet," nor does "Quicken" bring to mind "money manager."
But there are a lot more quirkily named apps in the Linux world, for one. For two, even if they have odd names, these Windows programs have been around so long that most people know what they do. Distros such as PCLinuxOS are trying to appeal to Windows users — to show them that Linux is just as good as Windows. And in most cases it is.
But it’s that one additional step toward true novice usability that’s missing. Installing four or five text editors for the sake of offering choice isn’t the answer. Pick the best of breed apps and offer those. Yes, you’d be making a judgement call, but that’s fine; that’s what end users expect.
Linux is so, so close to being a viable Windows replacement for novices. I’m looking forward to the day when it crosses the line.
Every now and again I take the time to install a Linux distro on an extra machine I have laying around. Or lying around. I always get that mixed up.
Anyway, this time it was a 933-MHz machine I got from a friend. It had [shiver] Windows ME on it, which meant that it was getting a new OS no matter what.
After a bit of re-research, I decided once again to go with a Ubuntu-based distro. (For those of you who don’t know, Ubuntu is one of the most popular versions or "distros" of Linux, in large part because it’s both easy to use and very good looking. And yes, I’ve had dates like that.)
I prefer Kubuntu to Ubuntu; behind the scenes they’re the same, but Kubuntu uses the KDE desktop environment (i.e., the look and feel), which I like better than the Gnome environment that Ubuntu uses.
This time, though, I went with Xubuntu, which is designed to work well on older, slower systems. The machine it was going on isn’t that slow, but I liked the idea of a zippy machine, and I like Xubuntu’s Xfce environment.
So I downloaded and installed it with barely a hitch. (The only problem came from the hardware tweaking I had done. The OS itself was just fine.)
Last time I tried Linux at length,which I wrote about in my USA Today column, I found a bunch of rough edges. Some of them are gone, but many remain. This time, though, I went into it with the mindset more of someone who was going to use it himself, as opposed to evaluating it for a novice user. In other words, if I had to jump through a few hoops to get things the way I wanted them, that was OK.
Rough edges
Say what you want about Microsoft, but some of the handholding is nice to have. For example, when Xubuntu wanted to know how I wanted it to use the hard drive space, it gave me choices something like "Resize IDE1 master (hda1)."
What it should have done is say, "I detect a 120-GB hard drive that already contains 42GB of files. How would you like me to set up that drive for Xubuntu?
A) Use all the free space for Xubuntu B) Erase the disk and use the whole thing for Xubuntu C) Use a portion of the current free space for Xubuntu [advanced]?
Until the [X/K]ubuntu developers start thinking like that, it’s not going to be ready for the teeming millions.
Anyway, I said I wasn’t going to think too much like a novice, so the partitioning choices weren’t a big deal. I wiped the drive and installed. Then I spent some time tweaking things to my liking. Eventually all was well, and it was working smoothly.
And then those rough edges and annoyances appeared.
I’ve already mentioned that one of Linux’s strengths is also a weakness: too much choice. Imagine if your Windows machine came with four different text editors and three calculators. Luckily, this version of Xubuntu (Feisty Fawn) is significantly leaner. Yes, there were two word processors (AbiWord and OpenOffice’s Writer), but for the most part it wasn’t that annoying.
Some annoyances remain. Tweaking the general appearance — color scheme, menu bar behavior, display settings — means going to three or four different control panels instead of a single "Appearance" or "Display Properties." Very frustrating trying to keep that straight.
Xubuntu — and all the distros I’ve used — come with a gadzillion fonts. I supposed that’s all right, but many, many of them are strikingly similar to one another. There are, simply, too many fonts and not enough variation. (You have to install the basic Windows fonts yourself. That’s important because so many Web sites use Times New Roman, Arial, Georgia, and Verdana.)
In Windows, your fonts are in your /Windows/fonts directory. In Linux they’re in /usr/shared/fonts/truetype — something you wouldn’t even guess. I discovered it via a Google search and cleaned out a ton of useless typefaces, including what seemed like dozens of non-Latin-character sets.
Missing pieces
Linux also suffers from a dearth of truly high-quality, polished applications. Yes, The GIMP is a darned good image editor, but it’s not up to Photoshop level; it’s like store-brand ketchup compared to Heinz — decent, unless you’ve already used the good stuff. Ditto for OpenOffice, which has improved some since last I tried it, but still isn’t nearly as finished as Word.
Most annoyingly, there is simply no good video editor for Linux. I dabble in that enough that I couldn’t switch to Xubuntu full time.
Even if I could, there’s another missing piece: a blog client. There are no blog tools for Linux even close to the sophistication of Windows Live Writer, which sets the standard (and is free). Linux blog tools are fine unless you want to include images in your posts, in which case the procedure is clunky at best. WLW lets you drag and drop pictures from your hard drive into a post and handles uploading and positioning for you.
There are some wonderful Linux apps, to be sure, and my two workhorses — Firefox and Thunderbird — are both available. But even installing them isn’t straightforward. Do you download a .deb or .rpm file when given the choice? And even when you pick the right one you might have to navigate some cryptic screens. (Last time I spend hours dealing with "dependencies" for a video editor I wanted before finally giving up the ghost. Linux needs an equivalent of "setup.exe.")
For e-mail, Web browsing, light image editing, and most basic tasks, Linux remains an excellent choice. But as a replacement for Windows it needs a dose of hand-holding user friendliness.
Clearly Eli Manning’s quarterbacking skills remain average at best, and with key injuries it’s gonna be tough just to make the playoffs.
Perhaps the Giants’ best bet is a bit of intimidation. They could take a page from the New Zealand national rugby team, the All Blacks. Here’s what they do before every game:
We got our PODS pod delivered today (that’s Portable On-Demand Storage). Basically you get a small moving truck (minus the truck part) delivered to your house. You fill it up at your leisure and can either keep it there as on-site storage for $100 a month, or have it stored at the PODS site. Then you can have it delivered wherever.
So our POD arrived from Roanoke with the last of our stuff today. They tell you when you load it that you should strap things down, which makes sense. It’s traveling on highways and byways and some shifting of contents my occur.
What they don’t tell you is that the guy who loads your POD onto the truck may tilt it at a 45-degree angle sideways as he loads it.
We loaded our POD carefully, but no amount of care can prepare you for your stuff being tilted to the left that far.
Luckily we had put the heavy stuff at the bottom and lighter stuff on top, but still — it was quite a mess when it arrived.
Note the wooden bed frame on the right, which came flying from somewhere. When we packed it, the POD was neatly stacked, not willy-nilly the way you see it here.
In one case, I had put one room air conditioner on top of another. These things are pretty darned heavy, but that 45-degree tilt was more than enough to knock one off the other.
The PODS guy who loaded our stuff also decided that the best way to get into our driveway was to drive on our neighbors’ lawns. They were none too pleased, and one threatened to call the police and file a complaint against them. But they must have reached an understanding — the driver and another guy came back and filled in the big rut in her grass with topsoil and seed.
Still, it gives you an idea of the amount of care they take with your stuff.
Of course, the PODS folks do tell you to strap your stuff down, but I assumed that was because of the general travel. It never occurred to me that they would deliberately roll it sideways!
Nothing appears to be damaged, thankfully, but I’ll certainly hesitate before I use them again. I’m just glad to have my things back so we can finish the move.
What makes Tetris so memorable is that it was so different — it was unlike any other game around, and it became a classic. Wolfenstein 3-D was similar; it ushered in the era of first-person shooters.
There are some great games out there, but most are variations on a theme. I love Far Cry and Crytek’s latest, Crysis, but the gameplay, while offering different weapons and more realism, isn’t all that different than, say, Doom.
So when a new concept comes out (one that works, anyway), it’s worth taking notice.
It looks sort of like a first-person shooter; that is, it has a first-person perspective, and you appear to be holding a weapon. But it’s not exactly a weapon. It’s a tool. It creates portals. Click and you open an entry door; click and you open an exit. Pretty simple, huh? But it gets wonderfully complex, as the trailer on the site shows.
For example, facing a turret gun with a box next to it, you open an exit portal above the turret, and an entry portal under the box.
The box falls through the floor and comes out above, knocking the turret over.
And that’s a simple example; the trailer (absolutely worth watching) shows lots more that are disturbing in their complexity. (Or in their simplicity. Open an exit above you and an entrance below, and you fall into an infinite loop.)
It looks like a wonderful combination of FPS and puzzle game, but with a completely new angle. And new angles are always welcome.
Update: Apparently the AP got it wrong. The British paper The Guardian offers more detail:
The killer blow came from the Harvard-educated representative of Papua New Guinea, Kevin Conrad, who used Mr Connaughton’s [James Connaughton, President Bush's climate change adviser] diplomatic gaffe of earlier in the week to humiliate the Americans.
Mr Connaughton had said: “We will lead. We will continue to lead but leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow.” Mr Conrad said, to applause: “If you are not willing to lead, then get out of the way.”
Miss [Paula] Dobriansky [the U.S. chief negotiator] finally pressed her button to speak again and said: “We will go forward and join the consensus.”
Yes, we all know that much of what we consider part of the Christmas holiday comes from pagan tradition, most notably the tree. And many people realize that “Christ” isn’t a last name; it’s a title that means “king.” (The modern version of Jesus’s name would be something like “Joshua Josephson,” or in the Hebrew tradition “Joshua ben Joseph” or something similar.)
But here’s an AP story about a pastor who knows a bit more about the Christmas holiday, and a religious scholar who actually bothered to check out the American Christmas tradition.
In researching his book, “Christmas: A Candid History,” [religious studies professor Bruce] Forbes discovered that major American denominations–Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, Methodists and Congregationalists–either ignored the holiday or actively discouraged it until the late 19th century.
That rejection was rooted in the lack of biblical sanction for Dec. 25 as the date of Jesus’ birth, as well as suspicion toward traditions that developed after the earliest days of Christianity. In colonial New England, this disapproval extended to actually making the holiday illegal, with celebration punishable by a fine.
So next time you hear people whining about ‘respecting the Christmas tradition’ or ‘losing the true meaning of Christmas’ or somesuch, take the time to actually get the facts and you might be surprised.
(Oh, and the New Catholic Encyclopedia says most scholars accepted that “the birth of Christ was assigned the date of the winter solstice (December 25 in the Julian calendar …) because … the pagan devotees of Mithra celebrated the dies natalis Solis Invicti.”)
Here’s a situation I find myself in. I won’t mention names or places, but it shouldn’t matter.
Not too long ago, I (A) had a bad thing (B) happen to me. The news was brought to me by two people (C, D). It was done in what I thought was a surprisingly unprofessional matter, and involved some, er, truth-stretching on their part.
Although D has a long-held reputation of being a nasty and vindictive person, I had always had what I thought was a good relationship with C. But they brought me the news together and naturally I blamed them both.
Immediately afterwards, I said some nasty things about the two of them to various people in various ways. I was shocked and appalled by the entire incident, and I lashed out through several channels.
But later I learned that what happened to me was almost entirely D’s doing; C was pretty much forced to go along with it (although "forced" might be too strong a word). Yet by lashing out at both of them, I ruined what was left of a decent relationship with C.
So here I am, having done something nasty to C, finding out that I was wrong to do so. My relationship is clearly and irrevocably severed. I suspect C might understand why I lashed out the way I did, but it was still pretty darned mean on my part.
Is there any way to repair this kind of damage? I certainly don’t expect to be friends — or even colleagues again — but if and when I see C again I’d like not to have to turn away.
The City of Philadelphia finally kicked out the Boy Scouts from city-owned property. Good.
The reason is simple: The Scouts believe in discrimination, and it’s against the law for a discriminatory organization to receive funds from the city. As the Scouts had been leasing the land basically rent-free, that’s considered accepting money. Ergo, they had to pay rent ($200K per year) or get out.
In trying to reach a compromise with the city, the Scouts offered to agree to a policy statement that said, in part, "prejudice, intolerance and unlawful discrimination in any form are unacceptable."
One: They would agree to the statement, but they wouldn’t change anything. That’s called "lip service"; it and $2.00 will get you on the subway.
Two: By agreeing to that statement, the Scouts would be lying. They are clearly and unequivocally intolerant and prejudiced when it comes to gay, as is their right. So they’re saying such behavior is unacceptable, but doing it anyway. What lesson does that teach? If you hate gays, say so and be done with it. Don’t talk out of both sides of your mouth.
Then there are these bits of flotsam from Gregg Shields, the Scouts’ national spokesman:
“Since we were founded, we believe that open homosexuality would be inconsistent with the values that we want to communicate with our leaders."
"A belief in God is also mentioned in the Scout oath. We believe that those values are important."
One: What values would being gay be "inconsistent" with? The Scout "law" says its members must be "trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, [and] reverent." Where does it dictate who you can love?
And the Scout Oath reads
On my honor I will do my best To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.
Again, how is who you’re attracted to inconsistent with anything there? Answer: It isn’t. Scout leadership is homophobic, so it’s reading meaning into these things where there is none. They might just as logically say "It would be inconsistent with Scouting principles for members to date brunettes."
Or, perhaps, "It would be inconsistent with Scouting principles for members to date outside their race."
Two: What Gregg Shields is saying — in the nicest possible way — is "God hates fags." He is saying that Scouts must believe in God, and that you can’t be gay and believe in God.
Think about that: It is the clear an unambiguous position of the Boy Scouts of America that gays cannot believe in God.
So tell me, why would I want my son to be part of an organization that is not only intolerant and prejudiced, but also willing to lie about it (for the sake of money), and that believes that whom a person loves somehow affects his ability to worship?
I hesitated to write this post because I knew it was going to take me a while to compose all my thoughts. But here goes.
We gave my son a Fisher-Price Imaginext dinosaur toy — specifically, "Razor™ the T- Rex." The company got so many things wrong on so many levels it’s difficult to figure out where to start. (And no, I’m not talking about nitpicky geek things like "the claws are too long." I mean… well, let me explain.
Gods, where to start. How about with the little man who comes with Razor™ the T-Rex. That’s right — there’s a caveman-like guy who comes with the toy, complete with saddle and… and… clubs. But not any ordinary clubs. One is a skull and backbone of some undefined creature and the other is a lobster.
Yes, caveman guy uses a lobster as a weapon.
But what really irks me is the whole "humans and dinosaurs" thing — the Hanna-Barbera School of Evolution, I guess. If you wonder why some gods-awful percent of Americans think that humans and dinosaurs lived together, it’s because of toys like this.
(A lobster?)
Let’s go on. On the back of the box are pictures of the other toys in the set: the Predators (T-Rex, allosaurus, anklosaurus, etc.) and the "Ecovores" (brontosaurus, triceratops, etc.). First, although I grew up calling it a brontosaurus, that particular dino has been renamed; it’s now an apatosaurus.
But "Ecovores"? Are you kidding me? They weren’t content to use "herbivores" — they had to come up with some new word to make it sound like the plant eaters were, you know, living in harmony with the Earth and all, while the evil predators were trying to eat them.
Think I’m stretching it? Nope. From the back of the box:
Imagine… a civilization of humans and dinosaurs, living together in a lush, green land. One side — the predators — are using up its natural resources, wiping out everything and everyone that gets in their way. The other side — the ecovores — want to preserve their land. And they’re willing to fight to make that happen. Will the predators succeed in destroying the land, causing their own extinction? Or will the ecovores stop the destruction and make the land a place where dinosaurs and humans can live together peacefully?
First of all you idiots, meat-eaters are just as much a part of the ecosystem as plant eaters. They aren’t "destroying the land" by trying to survive any more than wolves or owls or bears are. Second, an asteroid made the dinosaurs extinct, not the evil meat-eaters eating. Third, humans and dinosaurs never lived together, peacefully or not!
[bangs head on table]
It’s like Fisher-Price wanted to appeal to both far-left, tree-hugging environmentalists as well as right-wing nut-job creationists. And what they end up with is a mess.
Yes, yes, it’s a toy. I know that. But the toy would be just as good without the editorializing on the box about the evil meat-eaters and the loving, wonderful plant eaters, and about how humans and dinosaurs lived together. The Fisher-Price folks could have come up with a backstory that was a heck of a lot less stupid.
"In a distant land, dinosaurs survived to this day, and they share they land with a tribe of primitive humans. Plant-eaters struggle to make their homes while being stalked by the carnivores that want to make them lunch…." (And that’s off the top of my head.)
Come on, guys, just put a little thought into this stuff, wouldja?
I’ve spent the last week or so preparing for my move to Richmond. I hate moving. Hate it. But the upside is we’re in a great neighborhood with a bigger house, walking distance to a bunch of stores, and with terrific neighbors.
I say this by way of explanation of why blogging has been sporadic. Now that I have a pseudo-desk set up so I can do a little work I can get back to making the ill-informed and generally snarky comments you’ve come to — for whatever reason — expect.
Oh, and having sold thisisroanoke.com to some folks there, I am now starting a new blog: http://www.ayearinrichmond.com. My plan, such as it is, is to make it a year-long blog. Like a miniseries. In 12 months it’ll go away. Probably.
