 Sunday, 4 May 2008
 Things to Teach the Boy
(I'm starting a list.)
You will never finish everything that you will decide you want to do. Even if you started now.
On the one hand, this can be depressing. On the other hand... no, there's really no other hand.
The point is, choose wisely how you spend your time. Don't stand in the middle of highways at any time of day, but most especially in the middle of the night. You would think this would be obvious to more people, but apparently it needs to be explicitly said. One of my favorite life lessons is in a quote from Aristotle:
Anybody can become angry - that is easy
but to be angry with the right person
and to the right degree
and at the right time
and for the right purpose,
and in the right way -
that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
I'm still working on this myself.
But if we can teach it successfully, we'll have done a significant chunk of the whole raising-a-decent-human job.
The listing of various forces and entities which will make this difficult -- say, by:
- spreading guilt by association;
- sowing suspicion and resentment against entire races/nationalities/categories of people;
- telling you, the special special audience that THOSE PEOPLE think they are BETTER THAN YOU / are LAUGHING AT YOU / are LOOKING DOWN ON YOU and HOW DARE THEY, those elitists, god, don't you just want to go punch every last one of them in the face! (P.S. Buy my book.)
.. is left for the reader's contemplation at this time.
"Be angry with the right person, to the right degree. The More You Know." Your mother is awesome.
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Tuesday, 1 April 2008
Anybody check the calendar? UPDATED: Aha.. Apparently the blog post I referenced below was an April Fool by Barry Ritholtz of the Big Picture himself. The bullish April Fool's column by Mr. Kass exists, but the media reaction Ritholtz described was invented. How double-reverse-meta.
Sadly, the post was a quite easily believable and not weird/implausible enough to trigger my BS detector.
Following my own advice to think before passing on information, I had in fact tried (before posting it at all) to look at the original bullish column, but it was behind a subscription wall so I was unable to do aught but rely on Mr. Ritholtz's prior reliability.
Someone completely changing their outlook and putting 'April Fool' at the end (as Kass apparently did do in his original column) is clearly a joke.
A media critic (as Barry often is) criticizing the media for something they could well have done is far from clear as a spoof. (Some of the mentioned reports were on TV, no less, which isn't as easy to verify for oneself after the fact.)
I will have to be more careful, obviously.
When a pessimistic analyst suddenly turns impossibly rosy, it might behoove one to think for a second.
Internet Hoax Gooses Stock Market [fake blog post from The Big Picture]
Dedicated short fund manager Doug Kass, of Seabreeze Partners Short LP, put out an early morning, tongue-in-cheek commentary, titled "Time to Buy the Bull?" The long time Bearish market pundit and writer for The Street.com and Real Money announced that he was raising his year end price targets for the S&P500 to 1,666, which would reflect a yearly gain of 26%. [!!]
The Financial press read the commentary literally. The WSJ announced "Bear Flips Bullish!," causing equity futures to rally. CNN Money covered the joke as if it were a real news item, and Marketwatch declared "Short Seller Starts Stock Rampage." Barron's headline read "Longtime Bear Tosses in the Towel; Says New Bull Market is Upon Us."
...
The veteran fund manger had assumed that readers would get the April Fool's joke -- but never imagined it would go over the heads of veteran financial writers.
Some people really, really want to believe.
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Wednesday, 5 March 2008
Overheard in Pittsburgh today Downtown, Indian restaurant, lunchtime. Quoted/paraphrased as well as I can remember. Two white guys.
"Hey man, you want to get in on the pool?"
"What pool?"
"If Obama gets the nomination. You pick a day between that and the election, or when he'd be sworn in; you pick which day you think somebody'll get him."
"What?"
"Come on, there are people out there. You can't swing a dead cat without hittin' somebody who's going to want to do it. Some white guy will get him, you know it."
"Man, only you would think of that."
"It's $20 each."
"$20!"
"It'll be some sweet pot, come on."
"I don't have $20 to put on that."
"Dude. You'll miss out, somebody's going to do it."
"They are all over this town."
"They're all over this country."
Oh, and the security the Secret Service has been providing both Obama and Clinton has been ... somewhat lacking.
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Saturday, 23 February 2008
Naming thread So apropos of Dannette's comment, we do have to come up with a name for this critter.
We're plowing through some lists of baby names and are working on a short list.
We have some time left to go, so in the spirit of many heads being better than two, we figured we'd open the floor if anyone wants to weigh in.
We won't pick one for sure until he's here, and until then I need some way to refer to him, so: maybe little Barack, for now. ;)
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Thursday, 14 February 2008
News of late Two big changes are happening around here.
First, I'm going to be a dad. We're pretty sure Medley's the mom. Here's her post about it.
The little fellow is due to ship in June. We're crossing our fingers that he'll stick to the release schedule. Lots to do!
Second, I've changed jobs; in January I left my regular gig of four years and am plying the software engineering trade in the financial services sector now.
So, that's some of what's keeping me/us busy. How about you?
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Tuesday, 5 February 2008
super tuesday. get off my lawn. This is a day full of primaries that actually matter, and I'm stuck in a place with CNN on the tube.
I avoid CNN like the plague in general, but I don't have a choice here.
So the level of stupid, predictable, empty-headed anchor and guest blather is exactly what I expected it might be, and my goodness a little goes a long way.
I used to watch the Sunday interview shows a lot (some in high school, a lot in college and after), until it finally became clear how much they are about the "journalists", their narcissism and the storylines they want to peddle rather than the search for any genuinely interesting information or the questioning of truly dubious statements.
I miss David Brinkley. Dude, in hindsight, you were The Man.
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Tuesday, 1 January 2008
Happy New Year 2008 I think 'happy new year' may rank as the phrase most often repeated in any one day on Twitter.
We've been watching season 3 of The Wire today. Awesome stuff, highly recommended if you enjoy (but are starting to be bored by) ordinary cop shows.
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Tuesday, 6 November 2007
I Voted (Virginia off-year edition) 
Virginia elects its legislature and County officials in odd years, so unlike much of the country, today was again Election Day here.
Went to the polls around 6:20am.
No line at all at that time. Zip in, zip out. And of course it was pitch dark and raining..
For my half of the alphabet I was the 15th voter.
The ballot had about 12 offices, bond issues & other questions on it. Busy election.
And of course the county continues to use WinVote, a computerized voting solution. Just like all computerized voting -- when you really, really want no reliable audit trail or chance for a recount.
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catching up a bit From 10/19:
NYT: Picky Eaters? They Get It From You
The message to parents: It's not your cooking, it's your genes. The study, led by Dr. Lucy Cooke of the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London, was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in August. Dr. Cooke and others in the field believe it is the first to use a standard scale to investigate the contribution of genetics and environment to childhood neophobia.
According to the report, 78 percent is genetic and the other 22 percent environmental.
Pretty interesting, except for falling in the Caveman trap: ("HAY I BET THIS CUZ OF HOW CAVEPEOPLE DIDZ IT.")
Most children eat a wide variety of foods until they are around 2, when they suddenly stop. The phase can last until the child is 4 or 5. It's an evolutionary response, researchers believe. Toddlers' taste buds shut down at about the time they start walking, giving them more control over what they eat. "If we just went running out of the cave as little cave babies and stuck anything in our mouths, that would have been potentially very dangerous," Dr. Cooke said.
That's quite an implicit claim -- that this phase is the default for humans all the way back to cave days. Is that really something this study established? If not, this sounds like armchair essentialism, which I'm trying to cut down on myself.
kids · lolspeak · food
Absolute Nonsense from Dana Milbank on Social Security /Dean Baker's Beat the Press
While it would not be advisable to wait until the trust fund is empty, we are still 39 years from our next 1983. Mr. Milbank must think that this country is in great shape if he thinks this distant and relatively minor problem should be at the top of the national agenda.
Btw, if we changed our immigration rules so that the Post and other news outlets could freely hire more qualified columnists than Mr. Milibank at lower wages, it could eliminate close to half of the projected shortfall by bringing a larger share of wage income under the cap on the Social Security wage tax. This would be a real win-win policy. Where are the free-traders?
socialsecurity · policy · wpost · mediawatch · economy
From 10/22:
Stalin, Mao And ... Ahmadinejad? Fareed Zakaria @ Newsweek
Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran.
And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order?
What planet are we on?
iran · stalin · mao · war · northkorea · hitler · rumsfeld · bush
Improvised Explosive Oversight by George C. Wilson @ CongressDaily / GovernmentExecutive.com
Weirdly written. Like, borderline unprofessional.
No doubt about it now, if there ever was: House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has planted more political IEDs [improvised explosive devices] under President Bush and his Republican allies than any member of Congress...
...not to use loaded imagery, or anything...
Hurricane Katrina. Evidence that taxpayers got ripped off on the cleanup effort because of the Homeland Security Department's non-competitive contracting and its lack of supervision of the work. Ka-boom!
Ka-boom?! So, oversight of government contracts is like.. violent destruction? Terrorism?
George C. Wilson goes on to list several more oversight issues the Committee is looking at, each with a "Ka-boom!", then writes essentially favorably of the efforts.
So, IEDs are good then?
Is there an editor in the house?
government · oversight · policy · waxman
From 10/23:
From 10/24:
Fed fast food of opinion, ESPN audience starves for reported fact - Le Anne Schreiber @ ESPN
ESPN Ombudsperson goes to town - lots of quotable stuff relevant to other journalism.
Too many people are involved to attribute motivation, which at any rate is a dangerous activity. All I can say for sure is that factuality has been devalued in 24/7 sports media. If you look at the proportion of airtime and cyberspace devoted to reporting fact versus delivering opinion on ESPN, ESPN.com and ESPN Radio, it is clear that the main function of sports news is to serve as the molehill on which mountains of opinion are built. We don't have news cycles. We have opinion cycles.
sports · mediawatch · journalism
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Sunday, 28 October 2007
tabdump, delicious style Trying something different ...
From 10/05:
nowthis' bookmarks on del.icio.us
I'm collecting quick-style-links at del.icio.us now rather than at Furl. Need to come up with a nice way to not only grab these regularly and turn them into posts, but maybe also route them (sidebar vs main blog vs don't-blog) depending on extra indicators I put in.
So far, quite disappointed at the character limit on the Notes field (255), and especially disturbed that the Notes field will silently discard data if you type beyond the limit. Blech. Take a page from Twitter, people.
Still, the entry form is much more to my taste than Furl's. I'll pull down the Furl box at the top soon, and make a habit of pulling the links into blog entries like this one. That way I'm making my own backup as I go, and no one really has to go follow the delicious feed itself.
mine · blog
From 10/10:
Flutterby™! : Software hate
I know these feelings exactly...
All I want to do is write the implementation for 3 simple functions ... Should take me 3, maybe 4 hours, tops. I'm nine or ten hours into this mess, learning about crap deep inside Windows that'd make H.P. Lovecraft shudder in terror, I know that once I figure this stuff out I'll have both the "oh, that works" moment and the "I wasted how many hours of my life on...?" feeling of utter despair that accompanies any attempt to develop for Windows.
And I'm just filled with loathing and hate.
windows · programming
From 10/17:
From 10/18:
Property Worsens: Beginning, Middle or End? /The Big Picture
Commenter: "All one has to do is look at what the underlying cause is that is applying all the pressure, mortgage resets. Take a look at any chart showing the coming resets and we KNOW we are still only near the beginning. Q1 and Q2'08 are going to be where the pain threshold gets tested as one or more of the mortgage insurers to fails. Not to diminish the pain felt by hundreds of thousands of homeowners to date, but so far, this is nothing. People need to get the fact that we are still in the early part of working our way through the mortgage resets with the most severe months still in front of us."
housing · economy
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Wednesday, 10 October 2007
Dear writers of printer drivers (including Apple) Obvious, yet unimplemented:
If I tell my computer to print a document in a condensed fashion (2, 3, or 4 logical pages on one printed sheet) and the printout in question will actually fill fewer pages than specified, it would be most awesome if you would alert me to that fact and give me the option of printing the document with more pages per sheet.
(I don't always check how long a document is in advance. Printing 4-up when the document is only 2 pages long gives you 2 small page images and a half-empty sheet; not the best result. I should be told, 'This document is only 2 pages long; would you rather print 2-up'?)
Software Engineering
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