The 21st Street Mission run by Edith Keeler in "The City On The Edge Of Forever" has got to be the cleanest homeless shelter ever.
July 2009 Archives
4:20, 4:20, 5:21, 4:30, 5:15, 6:06, 6:50, 7:10.
Sigh. Fuck you, Continental.
I like gadgets. Everybody knows this. I also travel quite a bit, and have for years, and this isn't news, either.
In my gadget-loving travels, I've had plenty of chances to use GPS systems, initially just the Hertz NeverLost system. Hertz's Magellan-based car-mounted tool was fanTAStic in 2004, but has really not aged all that well. I didn't really realize this until I had to use National in Kansas City this winter, which gave me my first exposure to the Garmin line.
I'd already seen and played with these units, and was pretty sure I'd choose a Garmin if I bought my own, and my early trips to Kansas City with National's Garmins convinced me of that pretty handily. A touchscreen beats the Magellan's interface all to hell, and having the unit on the dash makes more sense than keeping it in the passenger footwell, too. (National's approach is also more flexible than Hertz's, since they don't mount the devices in the cars -- renting with the GPS option means they just give you a little bag with the Garmin and its cables inside, which makes yield management easier for them.)
Of course, busy as I've been, I never bothered to actually go buy one -- sure, it would be cheaper in the long run to own a $200 Garmin than to rent it for $15 or $30 a week, but the $30 is corporate money and the $200 wouldn't be. Also, I really only needed them occasionally, and so I kept putting it off.
Then I bought a new iPhone this summer, and realized a purpose-built GPS is probably a dead letter. Google Maps + the internal true GPS of the 3G/3GS iPhones isn't quite at Garmin quality levels, but it's enough that I don't need to spend another $200 or tote around another gadget. I've used it plenty to navigate in new cities or unfamiliar areas of Houston, and even without turn-by-turn, it's absolutely good enough to make the idea of a Garmin redundant, at least for me.
The real head-scratcher, though, is this: We took the Benz in for some routine stuff last week, and the loaner car was a 2009 C-class. It's a very nice car, to be sure, and comes with a fancy in-dash screen for managing various car features, including the built-in navigation system.
Which sucks. It's unremittingly halfassed, and I'm sure constitutes a several thousand dollar add-in. An entry-level $149 Garmin beats it all to hell; shit, the outdated NeverLost system at Hertz is nicer and easier to use. What the hell?
It's not just Mercedes, either. I have yet to see an original-equipment built-in GPS system that's better in any way than the current crop of pocketable Garmins. Frankly, the iPhone's drastically better and easier to use than any built-in, too, and gives the Garmin a run for its money. How long, though, do you reckon before carmakers get this news? Since Audi was still selling analog cell phones for $2000 in 1999, it seems likely we'll see these things persist for quite some time.
Weird.
Houston, specifically. The Economist has some nice things to say about us:
Mr Kotkin particularly admires Houston, which he calls a perfect example of an "opportunity city" -- a place with lots of jobs, lots of cheap housing and a welcoming attitude to newcomers.
He is certainly right about the last point: not too many other cities could have absorbed 100,000 refugees, bigheartedly and fairly painlessly, as Houston did after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. With vibrant Asian communities alongside its balanced Hispanic, white and black mix, with no discernible racial tensions, and with more foreign consulates than any American city except New York and Los Angeles, Houston is arguably America’s most enthusiastically cosmopolitan city, a place where the future has already arrived.
We Heathen call it Home. The state itself is certainly not without problems (as the article points out), but Our Fair City gets all too few shiny notices such as this.
(Is Barack Obama an American Citizen?)[http://www.hereticalideas.com/2009/07/is-barack-obama-an-american-citizen/] explains much about the birther movement. All you gotta do to understand their POV is reject objective reality. Utilizing three alternative frameworks of reality -- one of which involves the Norse god Loki -- the author explains how Obama may in fact not be the natural born citizen actual evidence show shim to be. Heh. Here's a taste:
It might seem, to the average person, that the “Birthers” must have a tough time proving their case. After all, Barack Obama has released his Certification of Live Birth, which meets all the requirements for proving one’s citizenship to the State Department. The authenticity of the certificate has been verified by Hawaii state government. Moreover, Barack Obama’s birth announcement was found in two newspapers at the time, and such notices were provided directly by the Hawaii Department of Health.
Faced with this overwhelming evidence, the average person will no doubt shrug and consider the case closed. There is no question that the evidence points to the conclusion that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and is therefore a “natural-born citizen.”
No question, that is, if you accept the dominant paradigm of metaphysical realism. That is, the idea that things exist independent of the mind and that those things are perceivable and knowable. Moreover, those who insist that Barack Obama is an American citizen also rely on philosophic naturalism–the idea that reality is subject to objective, knowable natural laws that can’t be tampered with.
However, if one rejects these two philosophic concepts, it’s quite easy to demonstrate that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is therefore constitutionally ineligible to be President of the United States.
The best part? Such subtle takedowns are sure to be lost on birthers, at least one of whom will read this and, failing to understand the big words, forward it to all their like-minded compatriots.
This week, I'll qualify for the top tier of Hyatt's frequent guest program.
If, in the course of my web reading, I encounter a video from YouTube that's long, or if I'm doing so from a place with questionable or slow connectivity, my standard procedure is to open the video and immediately hit pause. the YouTube player is smart enough to accumulate the video and hold it for me, and when I come back to that page in 10 or 20 minutes, the video will play uninterrupted.
What, then, is the problem with the Comedy Central videos? No matter how long I let them buffer, they always stutter and pause and require additional buffering.
Does someone geekier than I know why their approach is so broken?
Tom Knapp knows his way around a shotgun.
Intrigued, I found Knapp's own site for more information. Here you can find the answer to the twin questions "Are those stock guns?" and "How do you do international travel with shotguns in this day and age?"
ARE TOM’S GUNS CUSTOMIZED?
Although Tom’s shooting performances are out of this world, his show guns are right out of the box.
The story gets even better.
When Tom is performing shooting exhibitions around the world for Benelli, he doesn’t carry his guns with him. The Benelli importer for the country Tom is visiting supplies the Benelli models that Tom will use during his performance there. Tom assembles those guns right out of the box in front of his first audience.
Cool.
I had a long sequence of very odd dreams last night, only one image of which I remember well at all. For some reason, Mrs Heathen and I were having dinner with LeBron James, who was unaccountably dressed in a vintage Kansas City Royals uniform that included snowshoes.
My subconscious is weird.
I'm completely flummoxed that people -- cops, their apologists -- are in any way offended by what the President said about the Gates arrest.
The quote, for reference:
Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact.
Obama continued:
As you know, Lynn, when I was in the state legislature in Illinois, we worked on a racial profiling bill because there was indisputable evidence that blacks and Hispanics were being stopped disproportionately. And that is a sign, an example of how, you know, race remains a factor in the society. That doesn't lessen the incredible progress that has been made. I am standing here as testimony to the progress that's been made. And yet the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, this still haunts us. And even when there are honest misunderstandings, the fact that blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently and often time for no cause casts suspicion even when there is good cause.
There is absolutely no room for offense on any of this.
- Obama Assertion 1: Any of us would be angry in Gates' situation. You bet.
- Obama Assertion 2: The Cambridge cops "acted stupidly." That's also a no-brainer. After ascertaining that Gates was in fact in his own home, they arrested him for being angry with their behavior, essentially. It doesn't matter what he said, or how he said it. They put him in cuffs and -- this is priceless -- "secured his cane" before taking him downtown on charges they knew good and well wouldn't stick, and they did it because they didn't like what Gates said. That's stupid behavior.
- Obama Assertion 3: There is not a level playing field between whites and minorities when it comes to police interaction. It's hard to imagine anyone would argue this point, either.
Gates was in his home. Cops were jackasses. Gates got loud. Cops acted stupidly. End of story. If you're trying to make hay with this in the press as though Obama hurt your feelings, you're just as much of a jackass as the cop who cuffed an old man in his own home on trumped-up charges.
"He can speak French. In Russian."
This Star Wars fan-remake hinges on a great idea: split it into 472 15-second bits, and have random folks sign up to make a segment. So far, 24 are finished.
BoingBoing has a few questions. I'm pretty sure the answers are d., b., d., d., and e.
How about some pictures of the top of Everest from a hot-air balloon?
Yesterday, Chris Matthews smacked around nutbird Congressman John Campbell on the "Birther" issue, and got him to admit that yes, Barack Obama is a natural born citizen of the US.
This came up again today; I recall it circulating once before, years ago, and I'm sure it's on the Heathen Archives somewhere, but anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a repost.
Consequently, we present, once again, The 213 Things Skippy Is No Longer Allowed To Do In The US Army.
Ottawa authorities just discovered what happens when you leave a blank square on a roadside attraction sign.
Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates discovered how evolved we've all become on Thursday when he was arrested for breaking and entering.
At his own house.
After proving to police that it was his house.
I don't give a rat's ass if he was yelling at the cops. If the police show up on a B&E tip and discover you live in the house in question, they should apologize profusely and go the fuck away. Arresting him should not have even been an option, regardless of what he said.
This never before seen pictures of Armstrong on the moon shows his face through the visor.
In 1977, the TRS-80 Model 1 was the shit. Gizmodo has more.
The LRO has taken pictures of the Apollo landing site; you can see the lander and even the astronauts' footprints.
The Nobel laureate has left the Southern Baptist Church over its treatment of women.
After the publisher decided "you know, maybe electronic publication isn't what we want to do after all," Amazon deleted 1984 and Animal Farm (oh, the irony) from any Kindle that had purchased them. That they provided a refund as well is pretty much irrelevant to me.
More at Pogue @ NYT:
This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is "rare," but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we've been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.
As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.
If I buy a paper book, it's mine. Amazon can't come to my house and take it back, even if they want to pay me for it.
Honey, I think I've found our new house.
Add my right-winger cousin Chip to the parade of GOP types who can't keep their dick in their pants. Odds are this affair, the divorce connected thereto, and the lawsuit his wife just dropped on him are the reason ol' Chip's not still in Congress. Good riddance.
Now it's the turn of former Rep. Chip Pickering (R) or Mississippi, who appeared to be in line to grab Trent Lott's Senate seat and was allegedly offered the gig by Gov. Haley Barbour (his office denied this to TPMmuckraker), but decided instead to leave Congress altogether.
Pickering and his wife divorced soon afterward and now she is suing the novelistically named Elizabeth Creekmore-Byrd for "alienation of affection," i.e., for stealing her husband. What's more, according to legal papers filed by Leisha Pickering, some of the "wrongful conduct" between Pickering and Creekmore-Byrd (I guess that's what they call it down there?) took place at ... you guessed, the C Street group home up on Capitol Hill.
The kicker? This "C-Street" location is notionally a Christian fellowship facility connected to the uber-right-wing Family organization.
(Chip's grandfather and my great-grandfather were siblings.)
Hat tip: Mrs Heathen.
Yeah. This one's just as cool, if much more wacky:
I end up using both -- for a rich, formatted, in-house mail, Outlook is the winner -- but what's interesting is how much search SUCKS on Outlook compared to Mail.app. I can find mails in no time on the Mac side, but the Outlook search tools appear to be made of fail.
Four decades ago, human beings did the absolute coolest thing ever.
Remember this? Turns out, we're not the only ones to notice that the color-coded warning system -- five levels, but really only 3 since we've never been below yellow -- is a complete waste of time.
...you'll be very sad if you don't see the joy that is Star Trek II as an opera with action figures. Really. Click. Seriously.
Here.
(SFW)
Apparently, only 10% of respondents can answer these twelve questions correctly. They are not hard questions.
(Via Stina.)
Y'all please wish Chief Heathen Health & Legal Correspondents Triple-F and Boogielips a happy seventh anniversary!
Citicorp Center in New York is a striking building for lots of reasons, but the most obvious is that it sits on four huge "stilts" that allow one corner to hover over a church. Less obvious is its massive motion dampening system, developed to reduce wind-induced motion sickness in tenents.
Its most interesting aspect, though, is what happened when its structural engineer realized, several years after its completion, that his structure might not be as safe as it should be under significant wind loads, and what he did about it. Let's be clear: when I say "not as safe as it should be," I mean he realized the 59-story skyscraper might fall down.
Seventeen years later, Joe Morgenstern wrote a long piece in the New Yorker about what happened next; it's online here and is well worth your time.
They're talking about not releasing detainees even if they're acquitted. Goddammit, people, is it so hard to do the right thing?
The Department of Homeland Security's Advisory System -- you know, that bullshit chart of Green-Blue-Yellow-Orange-Red we've all been laughing at since 9/11 -- will soon enter its fifth consecutive year at precisely the same level of national alert. It should surprise no one that said level is "yellow" -- the one in the middle -- and that is has been unchanged since August 12, 2005.
Some makework Bushite drone came up with this goofball idea in the Great National Freakout of late 2001, and nobody has yet had the stones to do away with it. We Heathen wonder how many thousands of dollars have been wasted down this particular rathole.
Update: Mrs Heathen points out that it's Orange at airports. This is true. It's been Orange for . . . three years.
Actually, no, really. Jackson will be buried sans nogginfruit for forensic reasons.
Make up your own joke.
So, I got a new iPhone, and it's big enough to also be a reasonable iPod (32 gigabytes). This requires the acquisition of some new Serious Headphones, since the Serious Headphones I already own have no mic or switch; while they work with the iPhone, I have to take them off to take calls, and I can't pause the music without touching the phone.
I've been very pleased with my existing Etymotics, but had heard good things about Ultimate Ears, so I thought I'd give them a go. MISTAKE. for one thing, even the smallest of their silicon earbud tips made my ear canals ache, and -- odder -- listening for more than a few minutes produced a vague sense of nausea, which is just plain weird. All symptoms went away when I switched back to my ER-6i set.
Fortunately, Amazon has a liberal return policy, so my UEs will go back tomorrow for a full refund (minus a $5 shipping charge) in favor of a new set of Ety HF2s.
Lesson learned? Stick with what works. Heathen faithful -- or, at least, those of you interested in fancy headphones -- take note.
It had to happen, and of course it's Top Gear who've done it.
Cheap Trick are releasing their new record on 8-track.
Installing recommended updates and patches on our Exchange server resulted in (a) Windows Firewall being automatically enabled, preventing any access to Exchange and (b) the webmail client being completely hosed.
Several sets new on Flickr:
- In Which Dan and Shelli get hitched, presided over by Reverend Chief Heathen;
- In which we visit Layla and her parents in Nieceapallooza Part I; and
- In which we trek to Albany to investigate Nieceapallooza Part II: Electric Boogaloo.
CompuServe is finally dead.
Brit sketch comedy on homeopaths:
On this Fourth of July, imagine for a moment what Hunter Thompson would've done with this Palin situation -- and with always-wrong Bill Kristol's prediction that she resigned to prep for a 2012 run for the White House. The country's less interesting without you, Dr Thompson.
The Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport has 1,001 horsepower and a 2.5 second 0-60 time -- and will ding you a cool $2.1 million, or an order of magnitude more than the Aston-Martin DB9.
Did we mention a 2.5 second 0-60? Yeah. It's like that.
It is apparently impossible to log out of Outlook Web Access in a browser and then log back in as a different user without first quitting the browser. WTF?
Apparently, under the right circumstances, you can flush an entire role of toilet paper down an airplane toilet.
It turns out, some folks have noticed just exactly how awful the name is for the Gazprom-Nigera joint venture, but nobody expects them to rebrand.
Madcap hilarity is more or less inevitable now.
We Heathen have been occasionally enthusiastic users of eMusic for some time. They've been providing excellent access to indie or nonmainstream tunes in unencumbered MP3 format for years (well ahead of anyone else doing online music without DRM) on an "X downloads per month for $Y" plan, with varying values of X and Y that worked out to the best deal in (legal) online music.
That's over. In one fell swoop they've (a) gotten in bed with Sony and (b) basically doubled their prices without providing any additional value. Additionally, their previous policy of "redownload whenever you want" has been kicked to the curb. It's a complete conversion from helpful, sane indie provider to pain-in-the-ass faceless corporation.
My friend Hayden wrote this on Facebook. It sums up what many folks are feeling about the transition:
Yesterday eMusic began offering the Sony catalog to subscribers, and incidentally screwed over many of the same long-term subscribers. Here's what happened.
At the end of May, the eMusic CEO Danny Stein announced that eMusic had inked a deal to offer some of the Sony catalog to subscribers. This led to two changes:
New plans with less value for our dollar. Long-term subscribers were forced into new plans with fewer downloads for the same price per month. Some of these subscribers had plans that eMusic had grandfathered some years earlier. My former plan, for instance, was one I first bought in October 2005 for 90 downloads for $20/month. At at least one point afterwards, eMusic had modified their $20/month plan to include fewer downloads, but had allowed me to keep my plan. My new plan, however, is 50 "downloads" (I'll get into why I put scare quotes up in a minute) for $20/month. So my downloads have gone from 22.2 cents each up to 40 cents each. Still a better deal than Amazon or iTunes, but the effective cost to me has gone up by nearly 100 percent.
Album pricing. Some - but not all - albums with more than 12 tracks will now have a fixed price of 12 "downloads," a term that eMusic has changed to "credits" on some pages. Some albums with fewer than 12 tracks, especially those where at least one of those tracks is longer than 10 minutes, will now cost subscribers 12 "credits" to download. This really hurts in metal and jazz, where the bang for the buck has always been so valuable. For example, I had 4 Albert Ayler albums in my Save For Later list, each of which had 2 tracks per album. Now eMusic wants 12 credits for each. It's still a better deal than Amazon or iTunes, but a far worse deal than I was offered just the day before yesterday.
So I spent the evening going through the new Sony offerings. I should point out that this wasn't easy, because eMusic's website remains as clunky and unfriendly as ever. The only way to find out what eMusic had added from Sony was to scroll through the new pages, which list everything recently added in groups of 10. All the Sony additions were made on 6/30/09, and to go through them all, I scrolled through nearly 900 pages. Some of the additions are damn great (Skip Spence, the Clash, Dylan) and some aren't (wow, the whole Celine Dion catalog plus Kenny G plus the New Kids On The Block, oh my!). The thing is that like many of eMusic's long-time subscribers, I'm already a hardcore music collector and I already have most of the new additions that I would be inclined to buy. I ended up adding a few Dylan albums that I don't have to my list, plus some Ellington and Mingus albums. I expect that it will take me maybe 2-3 months to burn through all of the new additions that interest me. At least, at the rate of my newly enhanced plan.
Judging from the 1600+ comments on Danny Stein's original announcement on eMusic's blog, I'd say that I'm not alone in being less than impressed with what subscribers are getting in return for the new catalog and reduced-value plans. I understand that eMusic needs to do what it can to remain a viable business, and Stein said that eMusic had been under pressure from the indie labels for some time to increase its per-download charge. I don't like the suddenness of the change, nor the lack of a response to complaints from eMusic. It is as if they've decided that they don't care about keeping their often-enthusiastic long-time subscribers - or, at least, don't know how to show that they care - and that doesn't make much business sense to me.
eMusic also needs to figure out what the per-album pricing means to them and to customers. If many of the albums I was previously planning to download now will cost me either 12 or 24 credits (double-albums are twice the credits), why are all the monthly download plans and booster packs being offered in multiples of 5? Don't get me wrong: I prefer the base-10 idea, but why not make the per-album credit a flat 10 downloads, then? Not that eMusic would listen to me; I'm merely a long-time subscriber.
As another poster on Danny Stein's blog post noted, Sony isn't part of any long-term music business solution. They are part of the problem. See ya, eMusic. We'll watch you burn, and won't miss you.
Love dumplings, but all thumbs? They've got you covered.
Check out the new gesture support in Firefox 3.5.
Storm Large mashes up "In the Light" and "White Wedding:"
