Yearly Archives: 2007

HAHAHAHAHA!

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Political blogger Tbogg agrees with us that the Michigan-ND game is pointless. We can’t tell where this quote is from, as his link is broken, but it’s a winner:

Who will be the biggest loser of the Fighting Irish-Wolverine game? ABC, which is under contractual agreement to televise the game between two teams who have now lost four in a row dating back to last season, and whose defenses have allowed 37.3 (U-M) and 36.8 (ND) points in their first two games.

SabanWatch: Week 2

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Well, it looks like ol’ NickyLou made it past the gauntlet of his first actual SEC game, but don’t celebrate yet: it was perennial SEC football whipping boy Vandy, where the players are actually expected to score 4 digits on the SAT. (The only sadder squad in the region is in Starkville (which is hard to imagine, since MSU is in no way as handicapped by “admission requirements” as Vandy(HDANCN?))). Even so, a win’s a win. Let’s do the math:

Last week we determined that we’d purchased 1.4375 winning points per million after the Tide somehow managed to rout the I-AA Western Carolina team. We reached this figure by taking the margin of victory in that game (46 points) and dividing it by 32, the number of millions of dollars Saban’s contract is worth. This week, our winning score was 24-10, creating a 14 point margin of victory. 46 + 14 is a nice, even 60. 60 / 32 gives us the new Nick Saban Winning Points Per Million Value: 1.8750. We look forward to this reaching more promising levels later in the year.

Up next: a real, ranked squad in the No. 16 Arkansas Razorbacks, followed by No. 23 Georgia on 9/22. Saban doesn’t get another gimmee until late this month, when there’s a 3-week respite: Florida State on 9/29 (not even that much of a gimmee), Houston on 10/06, and Ole Miss on 10/13.

Things we don’t understand this week:

Joe Pa earns encomiums for beating the helpless Irish 31-10, this time with commentary on his “stout D.” Were the sports cognoscenti just not paying attention when then-unranked Georgia Tech kept the Irish out of the end zone entirely last week in their 33-3 rout, while the Lions gave up a TD? How is that “stout D” from a top-20 team? Even so, as we predicted last week, the Lions move up from AP 14/USAT 15 to No. 12 across the board on the “strength” of this win.

Once-mighty Michigan flopped again, losing to Oregon 39-7. They’re quoted as saying, however, that they’re “pretty sure” they can beat the Irish next Saturday in a contest that promises to be an utter waste of pigskin, time, and TV-time. The last time Michigan opened with two losses was 1959, while the Irish have been outscored by 51 points in their first two games. We’re sure it’ll be on TV. Whatever.

Third-Party Contract Oil’s favorite squad — still ranked, for some reason — showed they’re all offense on Saturday by allowing Middle Tennessee State to score 42 points; Louisville required 58 to seal the deal. Put those boys in a game with an SEC defense and we’ll talk, Danno.

This week’s vote for “least relevant televised game” goes to the prime-time contest between powerhouses Rutgers and Navy; Rutgers won, 41-24, and is apparently still ranked. For some reason. See above re: playing a power school.

Speaking of strong schools, what the fuck happened to Auburn? Jesus, people, it’s SOUTH FLORIDA, and you (a) go to OT aand (b) lose? You’re killing us, here. Christ. (Of course, the other side of this is that perhaps it means Saban’s got a good shot at his most important game, but that remains to be seen.)

Oh, and LSU — who routed No. 19 Virginia Tech this week 48-7 — is still only number 2, while the idle Trojans continue to enjoy their top rating. At least some of the votes for USC are defecting; USC was down to 40 first place votes, from 59. LSU picked up the difference.

So, we’ve been away from Outlook for a while

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And we like it that way. In the new job, though, we’ll have to at least be aware of it even if we don’t use it, so in order to facilitate some user migrations, we spooled up a virtual XP box and installed Outlook 2007.

Holy. Crap. This thing is totally broken. Here’s two bits we’ve run into right away:

  • First, if you go through the setup and elect to create an Exchange account, but get it wrong, you’re in a dead end — Outlook will really, really want to connect to the Exchange server, and if it can’t for whatever reason, it’s going to fall over. We couldn’t find any config files or Outlook folders in our home directory to zap and start over, so we asked the tech. Turns out, to make Outlook ‘start over’, you need to go into the frigging Control Panel, to the Mail option, and delete the bolloxed profile. Then you can start over.

  • It gets better. If, later, after getting Outlook running without an Exchange account configured, you decide you want to try to add one, you can’t — at least not from inside Outlook. Exchange accounts have to be added through the self-same Control Panel -> Mail -> Profiles mechanism we mentioned above.

Who thought this was a good idea? Is someone at Microsoft just trying to create absurdist, unfriendly, unintuitive, totally b0rked interfaces comprised entirely of Fail? We understand they want to tie everything to Windows so it’s impossible to switch, but come ON, people, the whole rest of the universe understands that a mail program is just a mail program, not something that should need to be managed from our operating system’s byzantine configuration tools. Sheesh.

This is an excellent example of why open tools are better, by the way. With an open tool — not just open source, but any software designed to be flexible and friendly to the user — you can use it while following your own software plan. With a closed, locked-up tool like Outlook, you’re definitely being coerced into following Microsoft’s business plan, which is probably not yours.

PATRIOT smackdown

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From the AP:

NEW YORK — A federal judge struck down a key part of the USA Patriot Act on Thursday in a ruling that defended the need for judicial oversight of laws and bashed Congress for passing a law that makes possible “far-reaching invasions of liberty.”

More:

The ACLU had challenged the law on behalf of an Internet service provider, complaining that the law allowed the FBI to demand records without the kind of court supervision required for other government searches. Under the law, investigators can issue so-called national security letters to entities like Internet service providers and phone companies and demand customers’ phone and Internet records.

In his ruling, [U. S. District Judge Victor] Marrero said much more was at stake than questions about the national security letters.

He said Congress, in the original USA Patriot Act and less so in a 2005 revision, had essentially tried to legislate how the judiciary must review challenges to the law. If done to other bills, they ultimately could all “be styled to make the validation of the law foolproof.”

Noting that the courthouse where he resides is several blocks from the fallen World Trade Center, the judge said the Constitution was designed so that the dangers of any given moment could never justify discarding fundamental individual liberties.

He said when “the judiciary lowers its guard on the Constitution, it opens the door to far-reaching invasions of liberty.”

Regarding the national security letters, he said, Congress crossed its boundaries so dramatically that to let the law stand might turn an innocent legislative step into “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.”

Thank GOD someone is paying attention. Perhaps the best part of the article, despite the awkward phrase in re: the role of the judiciary, which we’re pretty sure the judge didn’t botch:

Marrero’s lengthy judicial opinion, akin to an eighth-grade civics lesson, described why the framers of the Constitution created three separate but equal branches of government and delegated to the judiciary to say what the law is and to protect the Constitution and the rights it gives citizens.

Marrero said the constitutional barriers against governmental abuse “may eventually collapse, with consequential diminution of the judiciary’s function, and hence potential dire effects to individual freedoms.”

In that event, he said, the judiciary could become “a mere mouthpiece of the legislature.”

Dept. of Topical Onion Awesomeness

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For Joy and Boogielips: Woman Overjoyed By Giant Uterine Parasite:

NEW BRIGHTON, MN–Immediately following a physician’s examination for her menstrual cessation, 37-year-old events planner Janice Crowley told reporters Tuesday that she is “ecstatic” with her diagnosis of a rapidly growing intrauterine parasite.

[…] Studies have shown that while the disorder strikes without prejudice across racial, ethnic, and class lines, it bears a very high correlation with the consumption of alcohol at the time of infection. Although there is a low-cost daily medication available that can prevent the harmful symbiote with 99 percent efficacy, many women inexplicably choose not to use it.

[…]

“We’re thinking of naming [the parasite] either Robert or Lisa,” Crowley said. “I just couldn’t be more excited!”

Among the many signs that Crowley’s condition is deteriorating rapidly is a frequent compulsion to consume foods in unorthodox and often revolting combinations.

“For some reason I can’t stop eating olives dipped in chocolate cake frosting,” Crowley said cheerfully. “And the other day I just had to have sardines with butter and jam. Crazy!”

Nice move.

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Citing the huge backlash from the early-adopter crowd over the sudden $200 price drop on iPhones, Apple announced today that they were giving all iPhone buyers a $100 Apple-store credit as a goodwill gesture.

You always know that, when you buy something electronic, the price will drop dramatically, and quickly. It’s the nature of the beast. Apple’s step here — which is worth, on paper, nearly $100M US, but will cost them far less — is a grand gesture sure to silence 99% of the grumbling horde. Good choice, Steve.

We think a couple of these are ours, actually

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Missouri Loves Company provides some One-Liners Overhead While Hunting. Since Mr Missouri is actually a participant in this well-loved tale, we’ll provide a bit of context, just for fun:

“Madder than a captured Jap”
We were there for that one. One of the guides had taken a lone hunter to a field that ended up having no avian visitors. A city boy, said hunter was lost and essentially marooned until the guide came back to fetch him. Also, obviously the speaker is a war baby, since we can’t imagine anyone younger having this in their vernacular. Other than us.
“How do you put the magazine restrictor…”
That was us. Said game warden was a humorless fuckwit we’d already been warned about, but as we were manifestly complying with all available regulations (i.e., we had precious few birds), we felt comfortable jerking him around. He didn’t like it, but nobody liked him, so there you go.
“It’s not beer, it’s aiming fluid.”
We’re pretty sure Mr Missouri said that one, but the memory is necessarily hazy…
“If you miss the first two shots, the third one is just anger”
That was us, but we were quoting our dad. He was right. We used this line as partial justification for moving to an over and under a while back, too. Shut up.

Good thing we got Mrs Heathen a new iPod in July

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If we’d waited, we would’ve be able to complain about Apple fucking us with fancy NEW Nanos.

Seriously, though, they’re mighty nice. Even nicer are the new iPod Classics, which now come in 80 and 160 gig. It might be getting close to time to finally upgrade the long-in-the-tooth 15 gig, so we get one that’s not all funky and sideways before they stop making the good ones.

(Oh, and if you paid $500 for an iPhone? Sucker. The 8-gig iPhone is now $399, or $200 less than than the intro price. The 4-gig iPhone is no longer available.)

Mmm, literary artifacts

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Sutpen’s blog has a great notice up about the original manuscript for On The Road, which will be on display in New York from November til March. It is, as you may know, on a roll of teletype paper; Kerouac fed the roll of paper into his typewriter and didn’t stop until he’d created one of the most influential novels of his generation.

We think we need to road trip.

No pun intended.

Dept. of GAAAAAA

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Via BoingBoing:

Jennifer Sutton, 23, recently visited her own heart at an exhibition in London. Sutton received a heart transplant and her original ticker is on display as part of the Wellcome Collection’s educational exhibition The Heart.

Ian Murdoch is High as a Kite

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The Debian-founder-turned-Sun-employee seems to think OpenSolaris will challenge Linux.

Wow. And they say Jobs has a “reality distortion field;” McNealy’s must be amazing. Frankly, we remain baffled about Murdoch joining Sun in the first place. We hope he’s being paid in boatloads of cash, because any sort of equity compensation is a sucker’s bet. Sun continues to appear doomed, doomed, doomed. They made their bones on hardware that nobody wants anymore, and remain in the public light really only because of Java — which, amusingly, cannot be easily monetized. Spending cash and time on Solaris strikes us a just about the last thing they should be doing, and yet, here they are.

SabanWatch: Week 1

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Nicky Lou surprised a few folks last year by leaving the pro coaching ranks and returning to NCAA, but when the deal was made public most saw why: the 8 year, $32 million offer made him the richest coach in college football, which is presumably sufficient motivation to take the hot seat that the top job in Tuscaloosa has become.

Well, here we are in football season once again, and it’s time to measure Saban’s performance. We figure a basic metric might be points per million, defined as “total number of winning points divided by 32” n.b. that we’re avoiding scientific notation by working with millions, not dollars. You’re welcome.

Yesterday Alabama played a creampuff from a lower division: Western Carolina. That the Tide routed them 52-6 shouldn’t surprise anyone, then. Frankly, we’re mildly disappointed that UA fell to this I-AA temptation; we’ve long complained about contender teams playing softies, and this year is no exception. Nobody in the top 25 ought to be able to stay there with one of these gimmee games on the schedule, but then again Alabama probably won’t be a contender this year — they are unranked, and it’s a new coach.

(Of course, some ranked squads played I-AA schools yesterday, and we think poorly of them for it — though at least (e.g.) Penn State and Auburn had the decency to actually win, unlike 5th-ranked Michigan who fell to I-AA Appalachian State.)

(No, LSU playing Mississippi State doesn’t count as a creampuff; it’s a conference game.)

Anyway, back to Saban. The margin of victory here was 52 – 6, or 46 points. Ergo, the Saban PointsPerMillion value currently stands at 46/32, or 1.4375. We’ll keep you updated as the season progresses.

Addendum 1: It will be difficult for the pollsters to insist Notre Dame is worth a damn this year after their 33-3 drubbing at the hands of unranked George Tech yesterday, which warms our hearts. However, expect JoePa’s squad to get an undeserved bump in the rankings after they meet and (probably) beat the Irish next week.

Addendum 2: In the “why can’t they both lose?” department, the only top-25 matchup to be played yesterday saw Cal beat Tennessee 45-31.

No surprise here, frankly

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Via Wired’s Thread Level blog, we find this: FBI Spy Docs Show G-Men Don’t Understand Security. And they’re right. Click through.

Instead of personal userids, the FBI relies on log sheets. This may provide sufficient accountability if everyone follows the rules. It provides no protection against rule-breakers. It is worth noting that Robert Hanssen obtained much of the information he sold to the Soviets by exploiting weak permission mechanisms in the FBI’s Automated Case System.

We’re gonna start early this year

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, Louisville notched 73 points against their first opponent last night, but catch this: said opponent is Murray State (home of the Racers), and they aren’t even in Division I-A. Lousiville and their ilk (Rutgers, anyone?) would get their asses handed to them if they played in a conference with real football schools, and didn’t clutter their schedule with creampuffs from lower divisions.

As is, they don’t play a ranked team until November 8, when they’ll likely fall to Rod’s West Virginia squad. They close out against similarly-overrated Rutgers on the 29th. Between now and then, they face such powerhouses as Middle Tennessee State, Syracuse, Cincy, UConn, and South Florida. How they’ve started the season as a top-ten team is simply beyond me. Put these birds in a stadium with a major conference team, and our bet is they’ll fold like a cheap suit.

Crime in the Future

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Via Slashdot:

The FBI is investigating fifteen store robberies in eleven states, committed via phone and internet. The perpetrators hack the store’s security system so they can observe their victims. They then make customers take their clothes off and get the store to wire money.

Now that we’re older, we can become disappointed in the arc of a rock band in only 3 days

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Over the weekend, we had occasion to visit with Chief Real Estate and UFO Analysis Correspondent BC at his satellite office in the wilds of Alagoddambama, where we engaged in more cigar smoking than should be legal, not to mention the barbecue.

Anyhow, ol’ BC has music tastes sometimes more adventurous than ours, and definitely hipper. Consequently, we were exposed for the first time to a band we’d heard of, but never listened to: Rainer Maria, an emo-esque trio from Wisconsin (and eventually Brooklyn) that formed in 1995.

(The first disappointment was that they’re already broken up, but this may not end up being so awful given what followed.)

BC had their second album “Look Now, Look Again” (1999) on his iPod, so it was that that we first pulled off eMusic when we got home. It was as good as we recalled — hey, even Pitchfork liked it — so we went back to the well, so to speak, to see what happened next.

That would be 2001’s “A Better Version of Me,” which was, if not as strong as LNLA, at least as good. We liked it enough that we immediately checked out 2003’s “Long Knives Drawn,” only to find that we’d gone A RECORD TOO FAR. It’s plodding, and not nearly as interesting as the earlier work. As it happens, the mavens at Pitchfork agree with us (like we care) that the tension provided by Kyle Fischer’s occasional backing vocal are a key part of the mix, and that relying exclusively on Caithlin DeMarrais’ voice is a mistake. Sadly, nobody seems to have told Rainer Maria about this, as the final record provides more of the same. We doubt we’ll even bother with it, actually.

So, there you have it: we discovered the band on Saturday, and by last night we’d already decided when they jumped the shark. Someday, perhaps we can manage to compress the entire process of fandom to an afternoon.

Gah.

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Via JWZ we discover that someone in a position of authority, finally, has been found guilty of something in the wake of the Abu Grahib abuse scandal.

Lt. Col. Steven Jordan was acquitted on three counts:

cruelty and maltreatment for subjecting detainees to forced nudity and intimidation by dogs; dereliction of a duty to properly train and supervise soldiers in humane interrogation rules; and failing to obey a lawful general order by ordering dogs used for interrogations without higher approval.

So what was he guilty of?

The jury found him guilty of one: disobeying a general’s order not to talk to others about the investigation into the abuse.

Sweet God in Heaven, WHAT THE HELL?

Dept. of Temptation

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College football is upon us, and the Alabama opener isn’t televised except on pay-per-view.

Quick, somebody talk us into, or out of, paying $109 for ESPN’s GamePlan package on DTV.

Slacktivist on Black Sites

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It’s long, but go read it anyway; here’s the final graf:

What we do know is that any useful information collected at the Black Sites has come at an enormous cost. The fact that “90 percent of the information was unreliable” and the rest is suspect is a problem. But a far greater problem is that, as a consequence of embracing the KGB model [designed to produce confessions, not information], we have made ourselves suspect and unreliable. The CIA’s secret interrogation program, like the lawless detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, is a major obstacle to any meaningful victory in the “war on terror.”

Domestic Terror

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The goal of terrorism is typically to disrupt and frighten the target society, subverting their calm state, so that more attention is paid to the terrorist’s cause. It almost never works at creating change the terrorist would like, but it frequently succeeds at least in damaging the society targetted, not in the least because political leaders in these societies often play directly into the terrorist’s hands by capitalizing on the fear for political gain, or to increase their own fiefdoms.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is one such functionary; Bruce Schneier notes the following dialog from an oft-linked interview McConnell gave with the El Paso Times:

Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it’s a democratic process and sunshine’s a good thing. We need to have the debate.

Wow. “If we talk about security policy, people will die.” Um, bullshit. Democracy cannot thrive in an environment of secrecy. Certainly some intelligence should be secret, and some planning, but a hard line must be drawn between legitimate operational security and shadowy surveillance practices turned on regular citizens.

McConnell’s interview is interesting for a number of reasons, as pointed out at BoingBoing; perhaps most interesting is that he explicitly confirmed what the government has been refusing to comment on, even in court: that commercial telcos have been helping them spy on Americans. Also worthwhile are the links at the end of Schneier’s post, especially those to Salon.