Home > Messages from the Ether > February 2006

Where was I?

Last night we went to Eddie's Attic to see what's what at their Monday night open mic. I play there in two weeks. Although I had played there before manymany years ago, I had forgotten what a comfortable space it is. Eddie manages the process very well and keeps everyone moving at a good clip. (More importantly, he didn't try to grab half the evening for himself.) The process of early signup and cash prize at the end gives everyone a fair time slot and keeps the musicians in the audience till the end.

There seemed to me to be less variety than at the Red Light Cafe, but Lisa thought there were more accomplished musicians. I'm not so sure--people need to learn how to tune their guitars--but some were pretty entertaining all the same and there were many out-of-towners (and a couple out-of-staters). Because of the final prize, I think the smart players knew to sign up later in the evening as more and more musicians filed in--thus increasing the audience of musicians' friends. I, on the other hand, was so happy to get a chance to play before 11 that I signed up for the 7:30 slot. Sucker.

Afterwards was DaVinci's (of course) where I met a fellow Treo owner who was also a fellow programmer and--get this--owns a record company. He was visibly unimpressed by my rock opera about space aliens and Aztecs and diabolical plots, giving me the "how nice for you" sideways nod, but we still had a good talk and he'll be an entertaining character to know at DaVinci's.

Oh, and IIRC, DaVinci's bartender is going to be in a play at 7 Stages based on Barbara Ehrenright's book Nickel and Dimed. What a crazy world.

VMs

Interesting discussions (several clicks deep with comments all along the way) on virtual machines--JVM, CLR, etc.--via Lambda the Ultimate. Mastering a language is trivial, mastering the libraries is where the real effort lies. The common line of reasoning that goes like this 'She knows C++ therefore she will be able to pick up programming on platform X in no time', is becoming increasingly fallacious.

The White Rose, again

Back in June of 2004, Wikipedia's featured article was on the group of student dissidents in Nazi Germany called The White Rose. It is a very affecting story of idealists hopelessly trying to acheive their ideals, and I was reminded of it a week or so ago when Wikipedia had the anniversary of their trial on the front page. Looking through the current New Yorker, I see that a new movie out of Germany has been made of their story (an earlier one came out in 1982, also German). Netflix, unfortunately, does not have either yet. In the current film, Sophie Scholl is presented as somewhat wavering but ultimately resolute--the writers draw from recently available Gestapo transcripts. Reading "Die Gedanken sind frei," a song forbidden in Nazi Germany, I'm reminded of the upcoming film V for Vendetta. Alan Moore's original graphic novel was strong at times but too uneven. I don't have much hope for the Wachowski's giving it any cinematic justice, but there's always hope.

Treo 700w

Overall, I'm very happy with the Treo. Except for a few rare instances, you can navigate everywhere one-handed without having to use the stylus. (For example, you can't navigate in and out of the IE address box without actually reloading the address, and you lose focus completely when you shut down applications on the task manager screen--Option+OK. Very minor.) I'm moving from a Windows PDA with a larger screen, but I haven't noticed the difference and getting a smaller phone is worth it. I've hit the memory limits a few times--thus the need to shut down applications--which doesn't bode well for more extensive future use, but we'll see.

EVDO is transparently fast, but companies need to start producing better and more accessible PDA content. I'm using MapQuest's PDA maps, but I had to guess the URL because their main page actually sent me to the wrong location for mobile maps. I'm also using Agilemobile's Agile Messenger IM client for MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, and ICQ. There were a few hiccups on the software upgrade and it has some UI inconsistencies, but is otherwise good for a free IM client. And I'm still amazed at how good Georgia Navigator is for a state-run Web site.

The camera takes decent pictures in good light. It's about what you'd expect with a phone/camera and useful for that. I'll probably be taking a lot of pictures of wine labels when we go out so I can write them down later. Wine geek.

Overall, there's nice integration of PDA and phone features in a unit that feels comfortable. I'll be using this for a while. (If I don't lose it at a bar somewhere--at which point I'll kill myself.)

The IT Dud

Finally succumbed to the geek hype and watched the first episode of The IT Crowd on Google Video. Meh. In a discussion thread comparing The British Office with The American Office, someone posted that American humor is always more obvious and slow-witted. If The IT Crowd is to be a good example of non-American subtlety, it fails completely. The IT workers are anti-social nerds and everyone else is vacuous and computer illiterate. There's more comedic insight in a Revenge of the Nerds sequel. Add to that pratfalls and obvious sight gags and you have something equal to the more lowbrow American sitcoms. Just as the British gave us The Office, we've produced Arrested Development. I'm not trying to introduce a competition: just trying to dispel a silly bias.

There's good and bad from both, and unfortunately The IT Crowd is just a simplistic and generic sitcom. I'll sit through the second episode in the hope that it gets better, but I think people are just getting overexcited about spotting the Flying Spaghetti Monster and an old PET computer on the show and confusing in-jokes for insight.

Forever

The Memo by Jane Mayer: How an internal effort to ban the abuse and torture of detainees was thwarted. [ via The New Yorker, outlining retired General Counsel of the U.S. Navy Alberto J. Mora's struggle to stop torture by American agents ]

Unbelievable. I'm so tired of well-meaning jackasses accepting the morally deluded ticking timebomb argument when people in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have been held for months and years and there is in fact no ticking timebomb. But, I guess, you could say that with terrorists you never know if there is a ticking timebomb so every captive and every citizen must be treated as if there is, and we're in a continual state of emergency. Finally, now I can imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Some quotes:

[David] Brant [ former head of the N.C.I.S.] informed Mora that he was disturbed by what his agents told him about the conduct of military-intelligence interrogators at Guantánamo. ... Speaking of the tactics that he had heard about, Brant told me, “Repugnant would be a good term to describe them.”

Qahtani had been subjected to a hundred and sixty days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on forty-eight of fifty-four days, for eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called “invasion of space by a female”; forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash; and told that his mother was a whore. By December, Qahtani had been subjected to a phony kidnapping, deprived of heat, given large quantities of intravenous liquids without access to a toilet, and deprived of sleep for three days. Ten days before Brant and Mora met, Qahtani’s heart rate had dropped so precipitately, to thirty-five beats a minute, that he required cardiac monitoring.

...

Between confessing to and then recanting various terrorist plots, he had begged to be allowed to commit suicide.

Lawrence Wilkerson, whom Powell assigned to monitor this unorthodox policymaking process, told NPR last fall of “an audit trail that ran from the Vice-President’s office and the Secretary of Defense down through the commanders in the field.” When I spoke to him recently, he said, “I saw what was discussed. I saw it in spades. From Addington to the other lawyers at the White House. They said the President of the United States can do what he damn well pleases. People were arguing for a new interpretation of the Constitution. It negates Article One, Section Eight, that lays out all of the powers of Congress, including the right to declare war, raise militias, make laws, and oversee the common defense of the nation.” Cheney’s view, Wilkerson suggested, was fuelled by his desire to achieve a state of “perfect security.” He said, “I can’t fault the man for wanting to keep America safe, but he’ll corrupt the whole country to save it.” (Wilkerson left the State Department with Powell, in January, 2005.)

And Rumsfelds glib idiocy continues to repulse:

Mora drew Haynes’s [William J. Haynes II, the general counsel of the Department of Defense] attention to a comment that Rumsfeld had added to the bottom of his December 2nd memo, in which he asked why detainees could be forced to stand for only four hours a day, when he himself often stood “for 8-10 hours a day.” Mora said that he understood that the comment was meant to be jocular. But he feared that it could become an argument for the defense in any prosecution of terror suspects. It also could be read as encouragement to disregard the limits established in the memo. (Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired military officer who was a chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, had a similar reaction when he saw Rumsfeld’s scrawled aside. “It said, ‘Carte blanche, guys,’ ” Wilkerson told me. “That’s what started them down the slope. You’ll have My Lais then. Once you pull this thread, the whole fabric unravels.”)

A small setback

Trying to get booked at Smith's Olde Bar for their SongSmiths Songwriter Series--Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays, they book three or four bands to play. I finally got a reply from the lady that does booking and I'm not sure what I was expecting, but getting my music labeled as a "lounge-y stuff" was definitely not one of my original concerns. My concerns have now been duly updated. They were very nice though and provided a list of other venues that might be more in line.

Where was I?

Fiery Furnaces show on Wednesday with Lisa & Scott. Tried out my new camera phone (I'm one of those people now) with poor results:

First time to see them live and it was very entertaining. Much more noisy-rocky than their recorded stuff. She still cracks me up with her Freaks and Geeks fashion sense and complete non-persona on stage. It's perfect. I think we saw some of the famous sibling squabbling, but not sure.

Yesterday was my every-ten-years physical and believe-it-or-not I'm very healthy. Well, we'll confirm in two weeks after my blood gets examined.

Last night was Moresight at The EARL (forgot to post it here beforehand, jackass). Good show, but my sparse diet throughout the day--despite the food at Graveyard Tavern before--led to one of those hazy/blurry nights. LC was there. This photo proves it (sort of):

No good shots of the band.

Movies have been: Family Guy Presents: Stewie Griffin - The Untold Story (3/5) (a little thrown together, but it had its moments), Oldboy (5/5) (Asian extreme cinema that was very difficult to watch at times, but had an amazing story and range), Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (5/5) (bought it along with the three W&G shorts). Also re-watched Wild, Wild Planet and watched half of Mission: Stardust, but it had a bad scratch and I'm waiting for a replacement. Grr.

Oil

Chavez provides discounted heating oil for America's poor and the current administration wants to shut it down because it makes them look bad. This country is run by petulant children that care more about appearances than people.

More and more robots

In July of last year, I read Marshall Brain's "Robotic Nation" essay with some interest. BoingBoing just posted about the new Taco Bell/KFC robots taking jobs from honest, hardworking Americans. Damn dirty robots! "Robotic Nation" is, like all futurism, a crap shoot of emphasizing some facts and ignoring others, but it's still a good read.

Recent piano exercises

A couple of simple exercises I've been warming up with lately (in all major and minor keys):

The Edukators (3/5)

Good. A little long but with some satisfying moments and an approapriately un-preachy ending. Aaaaand, the main protagonist (1) carried a messenger bag, (2) drove a VW, and (3) used the All-powerful Newton! Someone to be respected. The three main characters "terrorize" the wealthy by breaking in and impishly re-arranging their furniture in unlikely stacks, leaving only the message "Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei" (your days of plenty are numbered). Something goes wrong (of course) but not terribly wrong. The story is generally well-paced, but maybe 20 minutes could have been cut from the 2:07 running time.

Google

I've recently become less accepting of Google's decision to work with the Chinese government (or, at least to work within their requirements). I expected Congress's hearings to be only silly grandstanding, and dutifully ignored them until /. took note of Tom Lantos' grilling of Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Yahoo, comparing their actions to those of IBM when it did business with Nazi Germany and suppl[ied] the machinery needed to handle the great indexes and lists needed to keep track of the processing of six million or so undesirables, and the consultants and technical assistance needed to set up and run that machinery.

At what point does profit become a moral issue? Another poster pointed out that Mr. Lantos probably has something with a "Made In China" stamp, so he shouldn't be so quick to single out Google, et al. That avoids the subject (i.e. Lantos acting of two minds doesn't change the morality or immorality of Google's actions), but also questions why the government hasn't grilled other corporations. Maybe this is why I wanted to avoid following the Congressional hearings; what they decide won't change my beliefs and will very likely be twisted with politics more than morality.

Where was I?

Watching movies: Heights was quiet and even flowing with a range of characters' lives intersecting. What's that style? Altmanesque? The only issue is that your radar goes up immediately and starts looking for the obvious ironic coincidences that might happen with (apparently) disconnected individuals. Done right--as Heights does and Crash does--and the coincidences build the characters rather that make the story simply gimmicky. Before that was Red Eye. Short and gripping; well-structured. I also just received Wild, Wild Planet and Mission: Stardust and am about to throw up from excitement. There's gonna be an Italian sci-fi double feature in my future.

Valentine's Day was going to be a nice dinner at home, but our refrigerator finally died. As would be expected, not much food was lost and we got it repaired by the extremely capable Mr. Appliance (who also diagnosed our washing machine) yesterday. Anyway, with no way to store leftovers, we decided to try for reservations at Toast and got in easily. Nice night on the patio with one grainy photo on my new Treo to prove it.

Next up: APWBWGTTD.

Disconnect

Muslims counter an image depicting them as violent by acting violently, and even the more moderate, avoiding violence, state that "[t]he rights of press freedom are not absolute" and that "Europe is godless and alone."

The abyss is staring back

The (partial) SBS Dateline Abu Ghraib Video posted on YouTube [ via BoingBoing ]. Our country is disgusting.

Netflix competition

1. Get an Amazon Prime account for fast shipping,
2. Spider the Netflix site to dump their 55,000 movie list in a database and flag their popular items,
3. Build a site:
• Offer only the most popular titles,
• Offer only one simplified subscription model ($10 for 2 at a time, limit 10/month),
• Allow users to select less popular titles so that they can be notified when they're available (this assumes that popular titles could be purchased immediately and the less popular ones in a month at most)
4. As rental orders come in, purchase locally or from Amazon with free 2-day delivery. You eventually build up a workable catalog and can respond more quickly.
5. Shipping would be from $2-3 one way, $4-6 with return envelope

Is this insane?

Changing screen orientation on my Dell Inspiron

I was quickly hitting Ctrl+Left-Arrow to go back in my browser history and somehow changed my Dell Inspiron 6000 screen to portrait mode (everything's sideways). The mouse still, of course, responded in the same way--expecting that you had some sort of tilt-and-swivel setup--so up was left and right was down. Sort of. No key combination returned me to landscape, so I did a quick--yet cumbersome--search. Nothing. I eventually discovered the steps that will get it back to normal, here they are:

1. Select the desktop
2. Shift-F10
3. Graphic options
4. Graphic properties...
5. Rotation tab
6. Normal

Tada! I'm an idiot, 'cause I still don't know what I did to swap the orientation.

Helping the economy

I've been on a frenzy:

• Finally upgrading my outdated-yet-inexpensive Audiovox Thera and moving to the Treo 700w. Sexy.
• After abandoning it years ago, I finally rejoined Netflix (just as a co-worker had abandoned it). First up: The Edukators and The Battle of Algiers. I may try to put my queue on the front page here when I eventually get the time to redesign.
• Keeping the movie theme, I finally found and purchased the seminal Italian sci-fi flick Wild, Wild Planet. This is Genius Manifest. All nay-sayers are idiots. Also took a chance on the similar Mission Stardust. Viva!

Bazooka

Recently acquired:

Our scientifified president

More reasons to ignore anything said in the state of the union addresses. An NYT editorial on the intellectual raping of NASA by Bush appointee and high school grad George Deutsch, points out the irony of Bush promis[ing] in his State of the Union address to improve American competitiveness by spending more on science.

Quick update

An odd social artifact of making edits in Wikipedia: it promotes further edits. People are probably monitoring any recent changes and updating those as it strikes them. There are also ways to monitor specific entries, but for most I think that the presence of a recent edit is what's promting the attention. It's a nice, unexpected benefit.

Paradise

Finally reading up on the "lost world" discovered in Papua New Guinea. One point, that I'm sure the language blogs will be discussing, is the relationship of this discovery to the large number of languages in that country. I think I first read about this in Guns, Germs, and Steel where the author was contrasting the disparate tribes and languages in New Guinea with the relative homogeneity of China. New Guinea's landscape is dense and mountainous and therefore difficult to traverse. Societies formed and seldom mixed because of this, and it promoted the development of distinct groups and cultures. In areas where there are no people, there are probably many more lost worlds to be found.

Suspicious

Getting photos back from the wedding we went to in January. I think some older Italian men were trying to move in on my wife.

Or maybe the other way around?

Quick response

When I posted my rant against George Deutsch two days ago, he wasn't in Wikipedia. That's changed now. He was also employed by the current administration two days ago. That's also changed. And like Brownie lied on his biography, Deutsch lied about graduating from college. This information bubbled up from some random science blog who knew-a-guy who knew-a-guy and then made a few phone calls.

Also check out Wikinews's exclusive report on who did what in the U.S. government's attempt to subvert Wikipedia. See also Wikipedia's page listing all edits with a score of whether they were useful or disruptive. My previous post.

Recently

I've been having dreams about getting on stage and playing piano poorly. The keys get all jumbled together, and I can't see the patterns of the songs or remember their structure. That's funny.

I've been tracking down issues at work with the mod_jk load balancer and the Tomcat Web container. Open source is nice, but I'd still rather be coding than configuring.

I've been putting off filling out my health insurance forms at work even though I reallyreallyreally need to get a checkup. I hate filling out forms.

I've been cleaning up the code in RadioWave--so that the schedules are parsed more cleanly--only to have the machine that rips scheduled audio lock up every other day. Win98 sucks.

Where was I?

Dinner out on Friday at Baraonda (they refuse to seat us in the newer area) where we crossed paths with hollismb. Then late-nite drinks at Avra. Manhattans for everybody! hic. Saturday was shopping for Lisa at Fab'Rik on W. Peachtree where she got a very cool dress for later that evening. Ooh la la. Said evening was a group dinner to try out the new-ish Lobby at Twelve over in Atlantic Station. Very nice. Afterwards, the crowd thinned down to just Lisa & I, so we ended the evening at Midcity Cafe. It's been a while. The long-haired bartender was now in a short-haired state after he donated the difference to children with cancer (maybe something like this). What a great cause. Who knew?!?

Sunday was a few hours at work then the superbowl at a friends where we warmed up with Napoleon Dynamite and I learned that I'm a horrible foosball goalie.

Throughout we've been watching season two of The (British) Office. Just two episodes left, plus the Christmas special, but I'm already depressed. I love The British Office, but The American Office is easier on the emotions--without being watered-down or cheesy.

America, idiot (part 2)

I recently posted Pharyngula's rant on America's confusion of politics and science. The recent revelation of NASA scientists getting strong-armed by political appointees to supress and alter references to the Big Bang (not so unique, but still unnerving) is unwelcome but relevant. /. points to Bad Astronomy Blog's nice, and angry, overview of the situation. The most despicable quote from said appointee George Deutsch:

This [discussing the Big Bang] is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.

Jackass. These people are idiots and should die. As we are bewildered by the crippling backwardness of Muslim extremists who demand foreign countries muzzle their free press, we should be looking as closely at our own fundamentalist dullards who would cripple science by trying to make it bend to opinion and policy. Have you no shame?

Today's reading list

Mark Liberman at Language Log discusses the absurd Cingular patent on hot keys for emoticons. In it, he links to Geoff Nunberg's piece from 1997 called "A Wink is as Good as a Nod," in which he trashes those silly things. I hate emoticons and only use them rarely (if you're too dim-witted to realise when I'm joking or being sarcastic, no collection of punctuation will help), but it was only recently that I realised exactly why I hate them. Whenever someone types a :-) or a <:-o I imagine them actually making that face. And it just looks ridiculous. Even Bazooka Joe doesn't over-emphasize what he's saying that much. Please, enough with the emoticons.

Semantic Compositions had a couple of recent classics. First, a discussion on the WSJ article about the death metal singing style called Cookie Monster singing or Cookie Monster vocals. Fascinating and funny. And now I may have to start listening to Fear Factory's 1999 opus Obsolete. It tells a story about machines taking over the world in the future and the rebels trying to fight back! Wacky!! I've got a passing familiarity with punk but haven't really listened to hardcore metal (although the movie Some Kind of Monster is very good, Metallica really ain't that hardcore).

The other SC article was on the frequency and variation in the 800-pound gorilla metaphor. 800 is the most common gorilla weight with 500 a distant second.

A /. discussion links to a review of search engines and privacy (which in turn links to, among other things, a more detailed article from Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineWatch). One poster hypothesized that although Google emphasizes the importance of complying with China's censorship, they would probably attempt to skirt the legal issues of data privacy addressed in most EU countries. The lesson: only obey local rules when it benefits you.

Why I don't watch the state of the union address

One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

[ via Knight Ridder ]

Fiery Furnaces at Smith's Olde Bar on the 22nd

I have tickets. Shouldn't you? There's no chance of missing out this time.

End part one, turn tape over

Last night finished my four week re-introduction to playing out. Present this time--and suffering through another late start of 10:45--were Alicia and Dan (thankyouthankyou). The music had its rough moments in the unlikliest of places, but I got through the Yes almost without a hitch. The broken chords in contrary motion at the end of the piece (a la the middle section of Chopin's Etude in E Major, Op. 10, No. 3) were the riskiest section and make it a nice piece to show off with. I realized afterwards that I need to start positioning the keyboard at an angle to the audience--people will still hear mistakes but they might not notice as much if they're focusing on my hands. Sneaky. I also need to start looking at the audience when I'm talking in between songs. There's sortof an I-can't-see-them-so-they-can't-see-me deceit that I slip into.

This was by far the least interesting open mic. It started out with several new faces and some promise, but devolved quickly into Starbuck's pop and lesbian folk. I have refrained from criticizing because (1) we're all just trying to play some music and have fun, and (2) if I'm going to be part of this "community," I maybe need to hold my tongue. However, the music critic in me really couldn't take much more by the end of the evening. I feel that people get so wrapped up in the sound of their own voice or the resonant feel of an acoustic guitar miked to a large room, that they forget that there's a need to actually write interesting songs that are carried by those instruments. And if you feel bored strumming F C G for the millionth time: listeners are going to be even more bored. And if I hear one more cliched metaphor about love, I'm going to puke out a rhyming dictionary (no more saying that someone is your "world," "the love of your life," or that they mean "everything" to you, and if you're "put on the back-burner" it certainly makes no sense that you're also "crawling on the floor").

That being said, there were still some pleasant surprises and a few very entertaining songs. The Tom Waits-duo were there with some gravelly fun, and a couple of kids played some expletive-laden Dinosaur Jr.-type pop at the end. Rock.

Also, one of the other performers told me that Smith's Olde Bar has something called the SongSmiths Songwriter Series on Sunday's, Monday's, and Tuesday's. They look booked up most of February (with our friends from last week, The Annunaki, playing on Sunday the 19th!) but it looks like a good option.

Open mic at The Red Light Cafe tonight

I'll be playing "The Photograph" from The Journalist along with Yes's "Starship Trooper". Both are knuckle-busters. After this, the only night I have planned is March 13th at Eddie's Attic. I'll be digging around for more. Some other musicians had mentioned Apache Cafe, but it looks more like a spoken work joint. I have nothing to say.

America, idiot

Pharyngula discusses at length an article from Esquire called Greetings from Idiot America [ subscription, free version here ]. A quote from the article:

On August 21, a newspaper account of the "intelligent design" movement contained this remarkable sentence: "They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."

A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. ...

It's a detailed redefinition of the anti-intellectualism that I rant against, and that they point out was deftly covered by Richard Hofstadter in his book from 1963 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. People have moved from hating expertise to believing that intuition is on equal footing with it. Intuition in the thought process is valuable in order to arrive at unique solutions; it's meaningless--or at least only personally relevant--if not subsequently vetted by knowledge and expertise.

And since I feel like I bitch too much, I'll quote the end of the Pharyngula article:

You would be surprised at how much email is sent to me telling me to stop being so derisive, that harsh language and ridicule turn people off and repel the very ones we're trying to persuade. My reply is like the one above; by refusing to ridicule the ridiculous, by watering down every criticism into a mannered circumlocution, we have created an environment where idiots thrive unchallenged. We have a twit for a president because so many people made apologies for his ludicrous lack of qualifications—we need more people unabashedly pointing out fools.