Yearly Archives: 2010

Old, Drunk, and On Fire — Redux

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Anything worth doing is worth doing again. I present the following for your amusement. Many of you are in these pictures, but (to a first approximation) none of you are with the right boyfriends or girlfriends. Except Eric and Lindsey, God bless ’em. Anyway, what follows is more or less the text of the original photodocumentation of this party from spring of 2000. Back then, there were no Flickr; we rolled our own and we liked it, so these were on the unfortunately defunct NoGators.com site. Since a server crash took it down, they’ve been tragically offline . . . until now!

In Which We Review Photo-Graphs Taken at Birthday Festivities in March, 2000.

Some time ago, I turned 30. (March, 2000.)

What follows is something like a photographic record. These shots were taken by my brother, who was apparently flummoxed slightly by his new camera; they’re a bit hot in places. Additionally, the photolab transfer to lo-res .jpg files didn’t do them any favors. Even so, however, here they are.

They are in no particular order. Though it should be rather clear which are early and which are drunker (er, later) in in the evening.

UPDATE – 2003

Yeah, now I’m even older, but in reformatting these pages for use on the new server, it occurs to me that a monstrous number of these pictures are, well, waaaay out of date. Certain people have gently pointed out that, well, their sister is my girlfriend now, and she even lives with me and stuff, and why is that other girl in my 30th birthday pictures?

The answer, gentle reader, is that Erin wasn’t even AT my 30th birthday party. So there. I mean, there was an Erin, but not THE Erin.

Also, I intend to keep these pictures up long enough for them to be embarrassing to certain children whose parents are shown here (when you’re old enough to read the Internet, kids, give Uncle Chet a call and he’ll tell you stories about your parents; Eva, Matilde, and Hadley, I’m talking to YOU).

UPDATE AGAIN – 2010

Now I’m even older than I was when I commented in 2003, but I’m not sure I’ll cop to wiser. Anyway, these pix have been forgotten for years, but looking at ’em now made me smile enough that I wanted to put them back online. But the bit about your kids calling me for an explanation in a few years? That’s still TOTALLY on, except now we have to add Gwen, Carl, and Layla to the list.

I’m a lucky, lucky boy. Cheers, friends.

It’s my birthday

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Today, I’m 40. Which means ten years ago, this happened:

Edgar_cart2.jpg

A somewhat more modest festival is planned for this evening. If you know where I live, odds are you’re welcome.

The Catastrophic Theatre Will Destroy You

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The next show, Wallace Shawn’s “Our Late Night,” opens on March 19 (special opening night performance, $50) and continues Wednesdays through Saturdays through April 3. All tickets after March 19 are pay-what-you-can.

The Catastrophic Gala is April 24, with special guest Jim Parsons. See you there.

Once again, the Onion rules.

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Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text:

WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

“Why won’t it just tell me what it’s about?” said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. “There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I’ve looked everywhere—there’s nothing here but words.”

Go read all of it.

Apparently, Edison was a dick

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Check it out:

You a big fan of aggressive IP enforcement? Like to think a well-litigated market is a healthy market? Hate those little entrepreneurial nuisances like “competition from emerging media?”

Well, then, you would have loved the early 20th century.

Because you had to get Thomas Edison’s permission to make any movie. Then you had to pay him.

Read the whole thing.

Brutal? Yes. But also very, very true.

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In response to the bruhaha at the Washington Post, which included such erudite complaints as

One called me to complain about “promoting a faggot lifestyle.” Another complained about the photo in an e-mail to the two Post reporters who wrote Thursday’s story about the licenses: “That kind of stuff makes normal people want to throw up. People have kids who are being exposed to this crap. I will be glad when your rag goes out of business. Real men marry women.”

one blogger has this to say:

Your kids are not to blame for your politics. Your kids are not to blame for your decisions. Your kids are not to blame for any way in which you choose to live your life. Your kids are your kids, and they’re people, and I know this is me saying this, childless whore, etc. And I’m not saying having children can’t inform your worldview. I’m saying own your worldview as YOURS, instead of hiding behind your children’s blankies and pretending you can’t help yourself.

Jesus H. Gentle Cycle Christ, I hate this. Like, how are we to suppose this works, that you used to be a fair and decent person but then you had a kid and decided, “You know, white sheets look fucking good on me now!” You had a kid and then went, “Hmm, suddenly ladies kissing each other is just not on!” Bullshit. You always felt this way, and now you can justify it with somebody who is more into playing with blocks or reading comic books than realizing his parents are total assholes.

Problem is, he won’t always be too into his own stuff to notice yours. So won’t it be fun for junior to read someday that you used to be a good person and now you suck, and he was the line between before and after? And not only do you suck, but you’re such a stupendous pussy that you can’t even give yourself credit for the decision to suck, you’ve got to shove it off on him? Isn’t that charming? Do these people listen to themselves?

You wanna be a bigot? You wanna hate gay people? You wanna wax redneck in the pages of the Post about faggot lifestyles and shoving things down people’s throats? YOU DO THAT THEN. You just go do it. You go and do that all on your own, slick. You go and do that because YOU want to do it, you stupid motherfucker. You go and do that because you’ve taken a good long hard look in the mirror and decided that writing pissy letters to the paper about how you don’t like reality anymore is the best way to spend your time. You do that because being a bigot is what you want to be.

Leave your children out of it.

(Via TBogg.)

Some days, Fred Clark is too awesome for words

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Slacktivist:

One reason for the current non-debate over health care reform is that the Republicans and Democrats are playing different games. Democrats, and President Barack Obama especially, are playing Jeopardy. Republicans are playing Family Feud.

On Jeopardy, facts matter. On Family Feud, all you need to know is what 100 morons might’ve told some pollster.

More:

At the recent health care reform “summit,” Republican leaders made it clear that they’re not interested in playing Jeopardy. That would be a losing proposition against President Ken Jennings. Obama was eager to show that he really does have the right answers — cost containment, near-universal coverage, lower premiums, better quality care, deficit reduction. All of that is well covered in the plan he’s pushing and any attempt to challenge him on the facts would be doomed.

So the GOP has decided to play a different game — to switch from Jeopardy to Family Feud. That way it’s not about the facts, or about what works, or about the actual effect of actual policies on actual people. In the subjective guessing-game of Family Feud, none of that matters. Family Feud is all about perceptions — about what those hundred people surveyed think or guess or dimly remember having heard something about.

And the Republican Party — with tons of financial support from their allies in the health insurance lobby — have been working very hard for many years now to make sure that those hundred people surveyed have a distorted, confused and mostly ass-backwards perception of the facts.

This is how you play Family Feud politics:

Step One: Redefine the facts. If a policy works, claim it doesn’t. If it will lower premiums, say it will raise them. If it would reduce the deficit, claim it will bankrupt the country. Obfuscate. Distract. Confuse. Lie. Lie some more. Throw random nonsense at the wall — death panels! — and see if any of it sticks. Don’t be troubled by contradiction or worried about consistency. It’s perfectly fine to simultaneously propose eliminating Medicare while posing as its defender. That’s absurd and confusing, but confusion is the whole point here. Confusion is good. If those hundred people surveyed aren’t completely confused, then you haven’t succeeded in rigging the game.

Step Two: Poll, poll and poll. Hire Frank Luntz. Poll some more. This is all you can afford care about. Family Feud politics isn’t about ideology, principle, values, good government, effectiveness, solutions, reality, facts, science or truth. It’s about perception and the shaping of that perception by any means necessary. Obsessively polling and recalibrating the message and then re-polling is the only way to be sure that you’re shaping perception in a winning way. Keep this up until the polls show that the confusion and disinformation sown in Step One have taken root among the hundred people surveyed.

Step Three: Cite the polling data. Call it that: polling data. The word “data” there makes it sound kind of like you give a damn about facts or reality or truth-telling. You don’t — you mustn’t if you intend to win this game — but you need to sound like you do. Argue that the polling data proves that the right answer is unpopular and therefore wrong. Argue that the facts are contrary to the will of the people. Argue that it would be undemocratic, tyrannical even, to insist on the right answer when the majority clearly disagrees. If you do this properly, you can congratulate yourself for being a champion of the very people you’re screwing over and even get some of them to thank you for robbing them blind.

That old “gaming sucks on Macs” thing? Yeah, about to be obsolete

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Valve’s uberpopular Steam game distribution and library system is coming to the Mac, along with the much ballyhooed Portal 2. The system will allow you to play the PC or Mac version of any Steam game you own.

It’s difficult to overstate how significant this is for gaming:

Valve has stopped with the teasing and has officially announced that its online gaming service Steam is coming to the Mac. As a bonus, the company also plans to make the Mac a “tier-1” platform, promising simultaneous release of games on Mac OS X, Windows, and Xbox 360.

Valve has developed a Mac-native version of its Source engine, using the cross-platform OpenGL. “We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” John Cook, Director of Steam Development, said in a statement. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward.”

Beginning in April, Mac users will be able to access games via Steam, including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series. The Mac Steam client is based on the latest version for Windows that is currently in beta, which is where the first hints of Mac OS X compatibility were discovered.

Huge. Huge. Huge.

Best Coverage So Far of Yet Another Wide-Stance Republican

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From CBS:

BAD: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk.

WORSE: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk AFTER LEAVING A GAY BAR.

WORSER: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar WITH ANOTHER MAN IN THE CAR.

WORST: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a MARRIED state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.

WORSTER: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a married, REPUBLICAN state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.

WORSTEST: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a married, Republican state senator from Southern California WITH A HISTORY OF OPPOSING GAY RIGHTS was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.

Really, the jokes just write themselves.

Followup on weird Russians

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The Internet is made of win, as there’s already an article online providing much-needed context for the very strange vocal performance I linked yesterday.

The man singing is Edward Hill, also known as Eduard Khil’, or, better yet, Эдуард Хиль. According to his Russian Wikipedia page, Hill was born in Smolensk in 1934, and finished his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1960. By 1974 he had been named a People’s Artist of the USSR, and in 1981 he was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples. He is best known for his interpretations of the songs of the Soviet composer, Arkadii Ostrovskii. As for the peculiar name, I could find no information, but imagine that he is descended from the English elite that had established itself in western Russian cities by the 17th century. He is not a defector of the Lee Harvey Oswald generation. He is entirely Russian.

The song he is interpreting, “I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home,” is an Ostrovskii composition, and it is meant to be sung in the vokaliz style, that is to say sung, but without words. I have seen a number of comments online, ever since a flurry of interest in Hill began just a few days ago, to the effect that this routine must have been meant as a critique of Soviet censorship, but in fact vokaliz was a well established genre, one that seems close in certain respects to pantomime.

Recent interest in Hill has to do with the perceived strangeness, the uncanniness, the surreal character of this performance. There is indeed something uncanny about a lip-synch to a song with no words, and his waxed face and hair helmet certainly do not carry over well. But once one does a bit of research, one learns that the number was not conceived out of some desire to cater to the so-bad-it’s-good tastes of the Western YouTube generation, but in fact was meant to please –to genuinely please– Soviet audiences who were capable of placing this routine, this man, and this song into a familiar context.

Go Read This.

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Paul Graham’s Why TV Lost sums up quite a bit that I’ve been talking about for years. Incumbent media have been caught flat-footed by the Internet for ten years, and they’re not getting any better at adapting because they still think of it as something they can compete with rather than capitalize on.

HOWTO: Blow Shit Up

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Chemist Derek Lowe has thoughtfully provided us with a list of Things I Won’t Work With. A bit:

The latest addition to the long list of chemicals that I never hope to encounter takes us back to the wonderful world of fluorine chemistry. I’m always struck by how much work has taken place in that field, how long ago some of it was first done, and how many violently hideous compounds have been carefully studied. Here’s how the experimental prep of today’s fragrant breath of spring starts:

The heater was warmed to approximately 700C. The heater block glowed a dull red color, observable with room lights turned off. The ballast tank was filled to 300 torr with oxygen, and fluorine was added until the total pressure was 901 torr. . .

And yes, what happens next is just what you think happens: you run a mixture of oxygen and fluorine through a 700-degree-heating block. “Oh, no you don’t,” is the common reaction of most chemists to that proposal, “. . .not unless I’m at least a mile away, two miles if I’m downwind.” This, folks, is the bracingly direct route to preparing dioxygen difluoride, often referred to in the literature by its evocative formula of FOOF.

Well, “often” is sort of a relative term. Most of the references to this stuff are clearly from groups who’ve just been thinking about it, not making it. Rarely does an abstract that mentions density function theory ever lead to a paper featuring machine-shop diagrams, and so it is here. Once you strip away all the “calculated geometry of. . .” underbrush from the reference list, you’re left with a much smaller core of experimental papers.

And a hard core it is! This stuff was first prepared in Germany in 1932 by Ruff and Menzel, who must have been likely lads indeed, because it’s not like people didn’t respect fluorine back then. No, elemental fluorine has commanded respect since well before anyone managed to isolate it, a process that took a good fifty years to work out in the 1800s. (The list of people who were blown up or poisoned while trying to do so is impressive). And that’s at room temperature. At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature. But that’s how you get it to react with oxygen to make a product that’s worse in pretty much every way.

FOOF is only stable at low temperatures; you’ll never get close to RT with the stuff without it tearing itself to pieces. I’ve seen one reference to storing it as a solid at 90 Kelvin for later use, but that paper, a 1962 effort from A. G. Streng of Temple University, is deeply alarming in several ways. Not only did Streng prepare multiple batches of dioxygen difluoride and keep it around, he was apparently charged with finding out what it did to things. All sorts of things. One damn thing after another, actually:

“Being a high energy oxidizer, dioxygen difluoride reacted vigorously with organic compounds, even at temperatures close to its melting point. It reacted instantaneously with solid ethyl alcohol, producing a blue flame and an explosion. When a drop of liquid 02F2 was added to liquid methane, cooled at 90°K., a white flame was produced instantaneously, which turned green upon further burning. When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred.”

And he’s just getting warmed up, if that’s the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that’s -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng’s reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn’t react it with: ammonia (“vigorous”, this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine (“violent explosion”, so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him.

Do this.

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Prompted by this post, I have just revisited my backup strategy. You should, too. Here’s what I do. Listen to me. Seriously.

  • Because I’m on a Mac, I can use Time Machine. Whenever I’m at my desk, my laptop is plugged into a 1TB USB drive and is backed up incrementally every hour. With TM, not only can I immediately recover from “oh shit!” moments, I can also “scroll back” and pick up prior versions of files. (Cost: Free with OSX.)

  • Because that’s not enough, I also create a complete clone of my internal drive about every two weeks using SuperDuper. I’m sure there are Windows versions of this tool, but the Mac makes it pretty easy. (This utility is also super-handy for hard drive upgrades; $27.95 for the full version.)

  • Because I work on multiple computers, I also keep nearly all my current files in my Dropbox folder. Dropbox costs money every month, but the peace of mind is worth it. When I make changes to a document on one computer, they’re almost instantly sync’d up to the Dropbox server, and then sync’d down to any other computers I choose to associate with my Dropbox account. This is immensely powerful stuff. Bonus: I can also grab any file from my Dropbox account from any Internet-connected computer simply by logging into the web site. Oh, and there’s even a friggiin’ iPhone client. Booyah. (Free for 2GB; $9.99/mo for 50GB; $19.99/mo for 100GB.)

  • Finally, I’ve just signed up for Crashplan after basically giving up on Mozy. Mozy was kind of early in this market, but they’ve suffered from software maturity issues on the Mac side pretty much the whole time, and I’m actively trying to find an online backup tool that works not just for me, but also for my company’s mobile professionals. Crashplan looks much better. Like several other tools, Crashplan backs your designated folders up to the server, which is how you get protection from catastrophic issues like fire or (more likely where I live) hurricanes. It also provides file versioning, which is a great boon and hedge against creeping data corruption. The downside (to all such services) is initial backup speed: I’m about two days into a 39-day initial upload. :( (You can pay them to send you a drive to seed your initial backup, but I made the command decision not to bother with the cost.) (Crashplan’s online option for individuals is $54/year for unlimited storage; other options exist for local and even enterprise backup.)

There are two kinds of people: Those who have had catastrophic data loss, and those who will. Protect yourself. If you can’t tell someone clearly how you back up your pictures, your documents, your financial data, etc., then you’re not backing up well enough. Give it some thought. Sign up for a cloud service, and get a big-ass backup drive at the very minimum. The data you save may be your own.

Dear Publishers: We’re Not Idiots

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And you should refrain from saying stupid things about ebook consumers, like “if you can afford an ebook device, you can pay more for ebooks.” Bollocks. Consumerist lays down some pointers you may want to check out:

On a more basic level, what consumers are willing to pay for a device and what they’re willing to pay for an ebook are two different matters and can’t be compared. But since [this publisher] is doing so, let’s take a look at them.

Maybe a customer can pay more for a digital book, but why should he? Currently, nearly all the value of the ebook format comes from the device, not the publisher. Portability, frictionless purchasing experience, syncing across multiple registered devices–all of that is provided by the device and the retailer’s back-end.

By contrast, here’s what the publisher currently provides in an ebook edition: typos, no additional content over the print version, no cover art, perhaps no photographs or illustrations, and no custom formatting. Saddle that with DRM that deliberately interferes with the consumer’s ability to preserve or make full use of his library, and you’ve got one pretty low-value digital offering from a publisher.

[…]

So you’re right, publisher; maybe I can afford to buy an ereader device. That doesn’t mean you can jack up the price on your crappy digital copy that currently offers less usefulness than a physical copy, and then hide behind the device’s potential and cry, “I want to be treated like I make expensive baubles too!” Because you don’t. You currently make poorly proofread digital files stripped of most of the qualities that make digital content awesome.

So here’s some other advice for publishers who want to win the cooperation of customers while also pricing ebooks in a way that’s fair to both sides:

Stop acting like consumers are being cheap. What consumers actually want are ebooks that are fairly priced. You’re trying to frame the other side as being irrational and greedy, but in reality consumers–despite the more histrionic posts on Amazon’s forums–are still not convinced that publishers have done anything to add value to the ebook.

Stop hiding behind your industry’s inefficiencies. You should try to improve them, not use them as a shield to protect you from criticism. The first thing that comes to mind is the waste inherent in how printed copies are sold to bookstores. In addition, acquiring, preparing for publication, and marketing books are all areas where publishers seem unable to innovate, despite the cost savings that digital distribution should convey over long periods of time.

Stop saying “trust us.” Smart consumers know that no self-respecting company is innately trustworthy, no matter how many years it’s spent trying to integrate that idea into its brand […]. Demonstrate. Prove your intentions through behavior. By that measure, publishers have so far only indicated that they want ebooks to be priced in the realm of hardcovers. […]

Stop the emotional appeals. Saying digital publishing will starve authors and kill first born sons makes it seem like you’re basing your business decisions on irrational fears, which helps no one. Just admit that you want to price your ebooks as high as the market will bear. There’s no shame in admitting that, and the sooner you do the sooner ebook consumers can demand that you step up and start providing real value in exchange for higher prices.

This just in:

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Congressional Democrats grow a pair or two. Reid: GOP Should Stop Crying About Reconciliation.

“Realistically, they should stop crying about reconciliation as if it’s never been done before,” Reid advised the GOP. It’s been done in almost every Congress. And they’re the ones who used it more than anyone else.”

Reid then rattled off a list of Republican legislative achievements that were pushed through the Senate. “Most of the stuff in the Contract for America was done with reconciliation; tax cuts, done with reconciliation; Medicare [prescription drug benefits], done with reconciliation,” said Reid.

Wow. Somebody needs to go to jail over this.

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That student-laptop-webcam-spying thing? Yeah, it just gets worse and worse for the jackass administrators who set this thing up.

  • Students were required to use the laptops.
  • Attempts to disable or control the webcam could be grounds for expulsion
  • The laptops were locked down such that there was no way to control the camera or microphone locally — but, of course, the spyware could do those things remotely.

Fortunately, it turns out the “tech” at the school can’t keep his mouth shut, and has been bragging about their security and surveillance methods online (which makes it obvious the administration was lying when they said this was only for stolen laptops).

More here.

Also, refreshingly and delighfully, the FBI is now involved.