Seen today in the SF Chronicle: “Comic rips media’s false sense of urgency“.
Quoting:
He railed on the political media’s poll-based coverage.
“What do you mean, polls are out?” Stewart, unshaven and wearing a gray T-shirt, said to the room full of suit-wearers. “You call 20,000 people, 900 were home. You ask them some ridiculous questions. And this is the core of your coverage? ‘Is Obama arrogant?’ Is that a question you can answer? That’s not even a metric you can measure. ‘Is McCain too old?’ “
Yet another free Kindle book, although this time not one from Tor. Spirit House is the first in the Vincent Calvino series by Christopher Moore. It’s an interesting idea; take an expat ex-lawyer and plunk him down as a private eye in Bangkok. Sam Spade meets Thailand. The locale did add to the story, but overall I must admit that I was left wondering why exactly the series is such an international hit. My reaction is partly personal; I like detective / mystery stories where I’m given enough information to figure out what’s happening (or what happened) on my own. The big reveal isn’t nearly as interesting if I had no chance to figure things out myself, and that’s largely what I felt to be the case here: the protagonist kept making revelations based on facts / observations that hadn’t been previously laid out for the reader.
I contrast this with In the Bleak Midwinter, another previously free Kindle book, which I enjoyed much more. Julia Spencer-Fleming does, to my mind, a much better job of involving the reader in the mystery by letting us know everything the protagonists know, so that we have a chance to figure out the mystery on our own before the big reveal.
In short, while Spirit House was rather fun, I’ll probably eschew other books in the series.
Bruce Schneier has some coverage of recent research examining the effectiveness of red light cameras. Bottom line? It turns out they tend to cause more problems then they solve. Either:
- They increase crashes and injuries because of the increase in people suddenly braking hard (and getting rear ended / pushed into the intersection).
or:
- Cities try to game the system by intentionally shortening the yellow light cycle (in a number of cases below the legal limit; who knew there was a legal limit for the length of a yellow light?) in order to drive up ticket revenue.
Every year the lab has a summer campout for IBM employees in the Valley (it works because Almaden is up in the hills above Santa Teresa). Anna enjoys it a great deal because she likes visiting my work and she likes camping. This year they had a small concert by the Baby Blue Blues Band, which was quite enjoyable. Fighting for highly constrained grill space is a bit of a hassle for the cookout, but they provide free smores and donuts in the morning so it’s hard to complain. And the lab is in a pretty location; I’ve seen deer, turkey, coyote, quail, wild pigs, and rattlesnakes since I’ve worked here.
Am I the only one who finds it amusing that people keep touting the $300 million Microsoft is spending on Vista advertising as somehow evidence that they’ll be able to convince us that Vista isn’t a failure? Frankly, if you have to spend $300 million convincing people not to uninstall something that automatically comes on new Wintel machines, isn’t that evidence you have failed?
One of the national pasttimes during the Olympics seems to be keeping track of where we are in the medal count. So far we’re atop China, but frankly I think the current score keeping mechanisms undercount how well we as a nation are doing. Time and time again during NBC’s coverage I hear commentators say “And here’s so-and-so of X. He/she trains at Y.”, where X is some random country and Y is nearly always a US university or training center. Ok, seriously people; how you can claim your nation has earned a gold/silver/bronze medal if we’re the ones training your athletes? So I think we (the US) should get partial credit in the medal count if the medal winner trains here. But we’re not greedy; we’ll split it with you, 50-50.
Of course, we’re willing to apply the partial credit rule equally. How many athletes from other countries train in China again?
Since I convinced our department head to pay for iPhone 3Gs for all of us I’ve also served as a primary contact for helping people acquire and configure their iPhones for internal use. As a result, I’ve had a chance to witness / hear about numerous people’s interactions with the telcos. And from that experience I have a single question: how on earth do the phone companies make money?
Ok, technically I know how they make money: they charge $0.20 to deliver an SMS message that costs fractions of a penny to actually deliver. But they have to charge that much in order to make any money because from everything I’ve seen they are totally and monstrously incompetent. We’re not talking “Wow, you people suck”, we’re talking “You people pro-actively suck. You go out of your way to achieve new levels of suck-i-tude.”
A few examples:
- The colleague who was told he had to upgrade to a new phone before upgrading to the iPhone because his old phone was too old.
- The colleague who was told he had to call AT&T customer service by an AT&T representative while standing in an AT&T store. Said representative further explained that he was prohibited by his manager to talking to the phone customer service representatives himself, so my colleague had to make the call and relay what they were saying to each other.
- The colleague who was told his old phone number wouldn’t work with the iPhone, so he needed a new number. But he could call customer service later to get the new number cancelled and the old number subsequently applied to his phone.
- The colleague who was told she should be eligible for an upgrade but the AT&T store computer didn’t have the ability to flag her as eligible, so she’d have to call customer service.
- The colleague who was told that he had a corporate account instead of a personal account, so he couldn’t get an iPhone unless he cancelled his corporate account, created a personal account, and then got the iPhone. When he agreed to those terms, the customer service rep proceeded to run a credit check to make sure he could get an account. Despite the fact that he’d been an AT&T customer for at least 5 years.
So apparently the US Olympics team consists of Michael Phelps, Kerri Walsh, and Misty May-Treanor. At least that’s my impression from watching NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. I’m sure we have three or four others hidden away someplace, but they probably compete in some really uninteresting sport, like fencing or judo. Y’know, some sissy thing no one would want to watch.
Can I say how amusing / sad I find it that within hours of Phelps’ winning his 8th gold medal NBC was hawking a DVD entitled “Michael Phelps: Greatest Olympian Champion… The Inside Story.” Yes, it was a very impressive achievement, and it’s quite an accomplishment. But seriously; congratulate him and move on. Stop with the interview specials. Stop replaying the clips over and over; that’s why we have YouTube. Move on to the hundreds of other Olympians who are also talented athletes and let us watch them compete.
The NY Times has a great article about Jon Stewart and the Daily show entitled “Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?” I know that these days most of my news (well, ok, non-technical news) comes from either the NY Times or the Daily Show. And one of the things that really comes through from watching the Daily Show is how much Jon really cares about this country (and how much it drives him crazy that our elected leaders are failing to lead).
Social software is changing our language. I’m well familiar with the notion of socializing people; OS X’s dictionary defines socialize as “make (someone) behave in a way that is acceptable to their society”. But I’ve never heard it used in the context of software before last week. And then I suddenly heard it multiple times within a single meeting: “Oh, we need to socialize the software”, as though doing so involved sprinkling some magic socializing powder over the software to make it support social interactions. I realize that technology does have an impact on our language (often an unfortunate one; e.g., it drives my wife nuts that people use “calendar” as a verb). But really, socializing software? Too bad the usage doesn’t logically extend my Mac’s definition. It’d be nice to have software that behaved in a way acceptable to our society.
jeff pierce 