HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

In re: the previously reported dumbassery of the freshly-hired Tennessee coach: SEC To Kiffin: Shut up, dumbass.

University of Tennessee football coach Lane Kiffin was issued a public reprimand by Southeastern Conference Commissioner Mike Slive for accusing Florida’s Urban Meyer of a recruiting violation during his pursuit of Pahokee, Fla. wide receiver NuKeese Richardson.

During a recruiting celebration banquet Thursday morning, Kiffin alleged that Meyer repeatedly called Richardson while he was on his official visit to UT.

[…]

However, that’s not an NCAA violation, or against SEC rules, but Kiffin’s comments were.

“œCoach Kiffin has violated the Southeastern Conference Code of Ethics,” Slive said in a release. “œSEC Bylaw 10.5.1 clearly states that coaches and administrators shall refrain from directed public criticism of other member institutions, their staffs or players.

“The phone call to which Coach Kiffin referred to in his public comments is not a violation of SEC or NCAA rules. We expect our coaches to have an understanding and knowledge of conference and NCAA rules.”

Dumbass.

In which we are impressed

I finally got around to playing with iTunes’ “Genius” feature. Frankly, the hype and expectations were such that I figured it would suck, so it just wasn’t on my radar. I’m not even sure why I gave it a whirl today.

Holy Crap.

Feeding it “Neighborhood #1” from Arcade Fire’s first as a seed, it then spat out 24 tracks from my library that, as it turns out, I wanted to hear right now. The list:

genius-playlist.png

Yeah, this is gonna get used. If you haven’t played with Genius, do so. Today.

From the Quote of the Day mailing list

“I am seriously glad to be here tonight at the annual Alfalfa dinner. I know that many you are aware that this dinner began almost one hundred years ago as a way to celebrate the birthday of General Robert E. Lee. If he were here with us tonight, the General would be 202 years old. And very confused.”

Barack Obama, U.S. President.

I never get tired of this; Porsche Uber Alles

Thanks to their brilliant financial maneuver previously mentioned here, Porsche’s 2008 profits actually exceed their revenues.

Porsche’s profits before taxes of $11.6 billion in the fiscal year ended in July were actually larger than its total revenues from sales of $10.2 billion. Not even Google has profits exceeding 100%. Only 12% of Porsche’s profits came from making cars.

[…]

In 2005 the CEO started buying into VW, at a time when VW stock was below $50. Today it’s at almost $400, and in October it briefly hit more than twice that when Porsche revealed that it indirectly owned options to acquire 74% of VW. (Analysts are guessing that the company is paying an average price for VW stock of $100 to $150 per share.)

The announcement sparked such a panic by short-sellers that the company offered to boost liquidity by selling options on more than 3% of VW stock – making in the process another tidy profit that Goldman Sachs estimates to be about $8 billion.

By having options on so many of the shares, there really weren’t enough shares for those shorting the stock to make good on their promises, producing the drastic run-up in the VW price — and an absurdly huge windfall for Porsche.

LOL.

Obama, apparently a bit of a dick:

5yxcu0.jpg

(Stolen from Reddit, hosted here because the original is on some ephemeral photosharing site.)

Wow. All this time I thought it was Fulmer…

…but apparently just moving to Knoxville makes you a douche. Freshly hired Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin is accusing Florida coach Urban Meyer of recruiting violations before he’s even coached a down, and for no apparent reason.

Precis: Kiffin signed a sought-after Florida prospect (Nu’Keese Richardson) that Meyer was also pursuing. Kiffin is sore that Meyer called Richardson while he was on an official visit to Knoxville, but that’s no violation. Kiffin’s just wasting no time in making sure everyone in the SEC knows he’s a whiner even when he wins, so at least he’s got that going for him.

Florida AD Jeremy Foley:

“There was no rule violation and we have confirmed this with Southeastern Conference. It is obvious that Coach Kiffin doesn’t know that there is not a rule precluding phone contact with a prospect during an official visit on another campus during a contact period. His allegations are inappropriate, out of line and, most importantly, totally false. It is completely unfair to Urban Meyer, our coaching staff, our football program and our institution. The appropriate action at this time in my opinion is for Coach Kiffin to make a public apology.

Nice one, Rockytop. Can’t wait to whip your sorry butts again next year.

(via Edgar.)

No more Goo-Goo Muck. Dammit.

Lux Interior is dead. You don’t know who he was, maybe, but you know the sounds he made with The Cramps, and you know the CBGB crowd he ran with.

It’s been shocking to most of the people I’ve talked to about Interior that he was an astounding 62 years old, hardly an age associated with transgressive psychobilly music, but there it is. Interior was born in October of 1946 into a bland and banal postwar world, and founded the Cramps in 1973. Interior and his lifelong companion Poison Ivy were the among the first to blend punk or pre-punk ideas with rockabilly, and created a sound more or less all their own.

The horrible and sad thing is this: Arguably the most significant and important generation of American rock musicians came through CBGB in the early-to-mid 1970s, and they were mostly 20 to 25 years old at the time, and with some outliers were therefore mostly born between 1945 and 1955. These people were born into prosperous postwar America, with radio shows and Ed Sullivan and Elvis, and somehow managed to create something entirely new. It was these bands — the Cramps, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, Misfits, Dead Boys, Television, the Ramones, New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, and others — that shaped a good chunk of what’s interesting in modern rock music, and it’s these bands that are growing older at an alarming rate.

Losing Dee Dee, in 2002, and Johnny, in 2004 — both born in 1951 — was the first shock, but we’re in for some more. These guys weren’t choirboys, and the elder statesmen in the group are closer to 70 than 60 (John Cale and Lou Reed, both born in 1942; Sterling Morrison, born the same year, got cancer and died young at 53).

Go listen to something loud, weird, and incomprehensible to your parents, since God knows that’s what Lux would want you to do, and it’s probably what the rest of the CBGB crowd would like, too. (Even if many of them are older than your parents; Mrs Heathen’s mom is younger than Debbie Harry or Lou Reed.)

(Has the great CBGB musical documentary been made yet? It’s probably not punk rock to want one, but I sure as hell do.)

(Lots more Cramps goodness at The Daily Swarm.)

Meanwhile, in the bizarre intersection of hip-hop and evangelicalism…

The hip-hop-Christian “p4cm” folks have an amusing line of shirts available, and they seem especially keen on getting the word about about becoming an EX-masturbator. They suggest you also follow the link and read — sorry: “hit up” — their new article inventively titled “Masturbation,” which is so full of evangelical-speak that it’s almost indecipherable:

And God’s method of operation for sex is marriage. He created the fibers of sex to be so strong that it could only be contained in the confines of marriage. What is marriage, that only It can contain the orgasm? Because only a contractual covenant can contain something so strong…Anything outside that method would self destruct. Any other orgasm achieved outside of marriage couldn’t handle its intense, explosive, addictive, domineering, gripping force without repercussions. Yes, you could very well achieve and very much well, enjoy one, but not without suffering the impact of its climactic aftershocks. Yes, I just said it, Church! Yes, the tremors may feel good, but the aftermath, the consequences of an illegal orgasm is traumatic. You can reach the heights of sexual stimulation during masturbation, but can you handle its control over your life?

Isn’t it a little, I dunno, creepy to push this kind of scaremongering about Rosy Palms and her Five Sisters in 2009? Also, how ’bout that grammar? Our official Heathen advice is to stop worrying about solo diddling and put that energy into something actually constructive. Item one on their new to-do list should probably be a proper composition class.

Principles of the American Cargo Cult

Via Making Light, we find this nearly perfect encapsulation of modern American non-think. The author explains:

I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways. By reflecting this skewed weltanschauung, the media reinforces and propagates it.

I call this worldview the American Cargo Cult, after the real New Guinea cargo cults that arose after the second world war. There are four main points, each of which has several elaborating assumptions. I really do think that most Americans believe these things at a deep level, and that these misbeliefs constantly underlie bad arguments in public debate.

His outline is simple, clear, and almost completely right as far as I can tell. He begins with:

I. Ignorance is innocence

Complicated explanations are suspect

The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything.

Certainty is strength, doubt is weakness

Admitting alternatives is undermining one’s own belief.

Changing one’s mind means one has wasted the time spent holding the prior opinion.

Your opinion matters as much as anyone else’s

When a person has studied a topic, he has no more real knowledge than you do, just a hidden agenda.

Hey, I said it was probably true, not likely to cause you to think kindly on your fellow man.

What a REAL apology looks like

The Senate Sergeant-at-arms — i.e., the fellow ultimate responsible for the crowd problems on Inauguration Day — has joined Facebook to post an exhaustive and complete apology for the problems some encountered trying to enter their seating areas, including the “tunnel of doom” problem.

It doesn’t make it right for those who couldn’t see the event despite having tickets (fairly fancy, privileged tickets, even — it was Blues and Purples who had trouble, not lowly Silvers like Mrs Heathen and I), but it certainly IS refreshing to see a public figure issue such an honest mea culpa.

Nerdery of a different stripe

So, a question has burned in a certain community for some time about Senator, then President-elect, and now President Obama. It’s a terribly important one, at least in a certain group, and that question is of course: “What watch does Barack Obama wear?”

Well, wonder no more. Short answer: he wore a fairly uninteresting TAG-Heuer until August of 2007, when his Secret Service detail gave him a watch for his 46th birthday (purchased from the Secret Service employees’ store).

It’s this big black chronograph that’s been in most of the campaign pictures, his official portrait, and that was on his wrist when he took the oath. No, you can’t buy one, at least not like his; they’re not that expensive, but they are limited to Secret Service employees.

Aren’t you glad that’s settled?

Dept. of Chickens, Roosting

Back when I was in the RFID business, we first started hearing rumblings of the colossally stupid notion of putting RFID chips in U.S. passports. Predictably and in true “Gummit Security” fashion, those in charge dismissed complaints from RFID and private-sector security experts with vague handwaving and unresponsive answers despite the fact that the approach was doomed to compromise almost immediately. No-contact data reads on a piece of ID? Why? And what the hell are you thinking?

Well, it turns out they really weren’t thinking at all, at least beyond “hey! RFID is cool!” A hacker has already put together a drive-by passport cloner/reader using only $250 worth of off the shelf parts. Color me completely unsurprised.

The digital equivalent of tire-squealing

So, when I got my first Porsche, I had a great time. I wrapped it around corners and shot off the line at stoplights and in general drove like it was meant to be driven, recognizing that doing so was wasteful and silly and, thanks to the softness of Z-rated tires, expensive.

The analogy breaks down at the tire point, since there’s no lasting cost associated with this kind of showing-off, but otherwise this 200 apps open and Expose-enaged screenshot of a Mac is definitely in the same category of silly trick. You couldn’t do what I did in my Porsche in a Camry, and you can’t do this with a Windows machine, but neither activity is particularly useful.

But they’re cool.

Ouch.

Since the meltdown began, I’ve been studiously following a practice that I was actually first advised of in a far better market environment: Do not open your retirement statements.

Well, at year end, you sort of have to, since they send you tax info that you’ll need for the 1040 process.

Ouch. 12/31/2008 value? About half the 12/31/2007 value, even in a mix of fairly conservative funds also age-indexed to gradually reduce risk. Christ.

Lies, damned lies, and the lapdog media

New RNC chair told CNN pseudo-journalist Wolf Blitzer “Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.”

Really? As TPM points out — and as every reasonably intelligent Heathen should know for themselves in Houston, of all places — this is utterly obvious bullshit. Thousands and thousands of people beg to differ, working as they do for organizations like NASA, or the military, or the park service, or any of an alphabet soup of Federal or state agencies that provide services we all take for granted.

Of course, we expect Republicans to traffic in absurdly transparent lies. What’s nearly criminal here is that Blitzer did nothing to challenge the lie. Tell us again about the “liberal media,” Republicans. Really.

Dept. of Open Letters

Dear Layla,

So, a week or so ago, your Aunt and I went to Washington to see something amazing happen. What made it even more exceptional to us is the fact that for you, in your life, it will always be simple history, just as “men walking on the moon” is a boring fact for your Dad and I but astonishing science fiction come true for your grandmother. Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States on January 20, 2009, and your Aunt Bo and I got to be there to see it happen, standing in the cold about 450 feet from the podium, in an astonishing crowd of 2 million amazed Americans.

We got this extreme pleasure because Erin worked her ass off on the Obama campaign here in Houston, organizing phone banks and canvassing squads, managing other volunteers, and generally making herself as indispensable to the local DNC and OFA staffers as she always is to me. This got us “Silver” class standing tickets, which put us in the outermost ticketed area — people behind us were ticketless, standing on the National Mall. (We found out later that we apparently were lucky to have the Silvers; some folks in the nicer, closer Blue and Purple sections were victims of crowd management gone bad, and never got in.) From where we stood, we could barely discern the podium, but we could see the Jumbotron quite clearly, and the PA system worked fine. We had no trouble hearing the speeches, the music, or Justice Roberts bollocksing up the oath.

Without these tickets, I’m not sure we would have tried to go — I hope we would have; being there is now one of my most treasured experiences, and rates on the list only a few slots behind the first time I held you. But we got the tickets, and Erin’s brother-in-law’s mom had room for us in Chevy Chase not far from the Bethesda metro stop, and we had the frequent flier miles to keep us from having to spend a fortune on plane tickets, so to DC we went. My boss was envious and supportive despite the crunch we were under at the time, and even texted me to cheer for him on Tuesday. (Of course, owing to the overloaded cell network, I didn’t get the text until well after the Inauguration was over. I’m confident our cheer volume was sufficient, though.)

The frequent flier mile tickets put us up there early, on Saturday, which was fine with Erin and I since we have friends in the District. We stayed with our friend Tony in Virginia that first night. His apartment was full of his kids’ artwork, and seeing all that gave me the same good feeling I always have when I see Tony and his kids. It’s neat to see who this guy from college grew up to be, which I’m sure is a feeling you’ll get someday. Anyway, we went out to dinner with Tony on Saturday, and then drove into the District to do some nighttime monument photography. It was super cold, and we froze our butts off wandering around from the Washington Monument all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial.

Something weird was going on when we arrived there; music was playing, and we could see shapes moving on the jumbotrons set up for Sunday’s Inaugural concert. We assumed it was a sound-and-systems-check of some kind — it was already about 9:00, and no one was out — but as we got closer we could recognize the singer. First, it was James Taylor, and we joked about “what kind of weirdo does a soundcheck with James Taylor,” but then it became an unknown voice singing “American Pie,” and we were close enough by then to be able to tell from the screens that it was someone actually performing. We just couldn’t tell who it was until we got a bit closer, when one of us said “Is that Garth Brooks singing American Pie which a choir?” Yes, yes it was. We figure it was a soundcheck or something — there was literally no crowd beyond those working the event — so it was kind of weird. Brooks, for his part, has been largely absent from American popular culture for at least 10 years now, so recognizing him (especially without his trademark hat) was sort of a challenge.

When we came back to the Mall on Sunday for the concert, it was with about 400,000 other people. The area around the Lincoln’s reflecting pool was a sea of people, all bundled up against the cold and forecast, but never actual, snow. A somewhat bizarre who’s-who of artists played that afternoon in honor of the new president-elect, from Bruce Springsteen to U2 to the 89-year-old folk icon Pete Seeger (and Brooks, natch, this time in his black hat). Actors read from significant speeches between musical numbers, and we all got a little taste of what Tuesday’s throngs would be like. It was here, on Sunday, that we first encountered the “friendliest massive throng of humanity EVER” phenomenon, as strangers willingly parted to reunite separated people, shoving was almost unheard of, and smiling epidemic. People danced and sang along, and listened intently when Obama spoke at the end of the afternoon. We were very, very cold when we made our way back to the Metro, but also excited and pleased and hopeful.

Monday was our less busy day; we were by this point working out of Virginia Ceasar’s home in Maryland, enjoying wonderful hospitality at a price you can’t beat (i.e., free). She was delightful to us, constantly ferrying us to the Metro at a moment’s notice, and for that Erin and I remain very grateful. We met up with the “Texans for Obama” crowd at a downtown brewpub for lunch, which turned out to be a delightful if insanely crowded affair. Erin’s crack squad of volunteers was there — including Paddy, a young man from Dublin who was so inspired by Obama that he took leave and flew to the US to volunteer on the campaign — along with the Texas-wide muckety-mucks and at least one surprise: an old friend of mine, long since moved to El Paso, had done a huge share of volunteering in West Texas since her husband worked for the DNC out there. It’s always fun to run into people in faraway places, but it was especially cool to add that kind of fun on top of the emotional high of Inauguration week.

Tuesday came quickly enough. The inauguration was set to begin at 11:30, as I recall, but we left Virginia’s before 8:00. She, of course, took us to the Metro station, fortunately on the same line as the Mall exit we planned to use to get to our section, Judiciary Square. The throng effect was already in place when we emerged just north of the Mall about half an hour later, and from that point on we pretty much stayed in a massive crowd until about 2:30 that afternoon.

There was some confusion about the proper walking route from north-of-the-Mall to the Silver entrance point on the south side, but eventually we did locate the path — which involved, hilariously, walking through an underground tunnel ordinarily closed to pedestrians. Walking, walking, and more walking ensued, until finally we found what we thought was the Silver entrance line. We followed it, and followed it, and followed it some more for about 45 minutes before we found what we thought was the end of it at about 9:45, our hearts sinking since the mile+ of line was not moving, and we were terribly afraid we’d be standing in line until well after the Inauguration was over.

In a gesture of absurd hope, I left Erin in the line and jogged about 20 yards over to a red-capped Inauguration volunteer to ask what was up. His answer saved our day: “yeah, the line’s broken and doesn’t lead anywhere. Just go back towards the entrance just west of the Indian museum, and you’ll get in there.” I yelled for Erin, and we ran for it, just ahead of a general announcement to the rest of the line. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

When we got the gate, we were cheek-by-jowl with hundreds if not thousands of other people all trying to move in roughly the same direction. (The upside of this was that it was the only time all day that both of us were warm.) Eventually, an opening happened, and we started to slowly “flow” into the Silver area, but we’d have been fine if we’d had to stay where we were: from there, at least, we could see the Capitol, and hear the PA.

We reached security soon enough. I assumed a full patdown was about to happen — I hadn’t even brought a pocketknife — but the crowds were such that they were just more or less waving people through to try to prevent a stampede, I guess. They never even checked our ticket, and by 10:30 we were standing at a fence separating us from 3rd street. A few minutes later we realized we could easily get much closer, and that’s when we relocated to our ultimate spot only a couple dozen yards back from the Capitol’s reflecting pool.

Looking back across the Mall, all the way back to the Washington Monument, there was an uninterrupted sea of people. Later, they said 2 million, but the Park Service — who control and maintain the Mall — no longer does official projections, so we’ll probably never know how many folks really were there. (It’s a fair bet that more will claim to have been there than actually were, too.) Where we were, we once again encountered the bizarre “friendly crowd” vibe so totally unusual for anyone used to big crowds — and when I say “big crowds,” I mean 50,000 or 100,000 at a major sporting event, not twenty times that for an event of global sociopolitical importance. No shoving. “Here, you dropped your glove.” “Need another handwarmer? I have extras.” “Let me take y’all’s picture.” And smiles, smiles, smiles. I got goosebumps as we stood, watching the former presidents — Carter, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and the incumbent — file in, and we all laughed and smiled some more when the cameras caught Obama’s daughters fidgeting and taking pictures of their own. Soon their dad stood, hand on the Lincoln bible, and took the Oath 42 other men took before him. (Quick quiz: why is the 44th president but only the 43rd man to take the oath?)

For your aunt and I, and for your parents, this election was more about getting our country back than anything else. Bush’s ruinous policies were hostile to growth, hostile to civil liberties, hostile to our national prestige, destructive to our alliances, and hateful to the principles on which our country was founded. Obama came from seemingly out of the blue in 2004 with a convention speech about fixing all that, and emerged quickly as a truly inspiring frontrunner even in the Democratic primaries two years later. The more he spoke, the more specifics of policy he proposed, and the more class he showed as a candidate, the more supporters he gained. He was the anti-Bush, but also a candidate of vision unlike any we’ve had in a generation or more. Clinton won twice, but he won by being better at the political game than the hangdog Republicans he ran against, and he was aided in both his elections by a freakshow third-party candidate that sapped support from the Right. Obama just plain WON, and in a way that reminded more than a few folks of RFK’s aborted campaign 40 years ago.

So there’s that, and this was emotional and incredible and hopeful, and it was this change that inspired many people, like me, to give money to a candidate for the first time, and to volunteer more time and effort than they’d ever given before. This was a huge opportunity, and one none of us wanted to blow.

But there was something else happening here, too, and it’s the thing I alluded to at the beginning of this letter. Barack Obama is an African-american. He may not be descended from American slaves, like his wife and children, but to the rednecks of our ancestral home that doesn’t matter, and by the time you’re old enough to read this you’ll know well the hateful terms those sorts of people would use for a man who looks like Obama. Bigots notwithstanding, America’s promise as laid forth in our Declaration of Independence does not stutter, and it does not equivocate: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This has been a promise unkept for most of country’s history. For the first hundred years, we kept our collective fingers crossed, and whispered “um, except slaves,” and called it ok. For the next hundred, we said everyone was free, but instituted a shameful system of separation and substandard services for black Americans, a situation only partly remedied by the 60s and the civil rights era. People fought and died to make the Declaration true at Concord, yes, but also at Gettysburg, and also in quiet and not so quiet ways in Mississippi and Alabama in the 1960s. Evil men murdered peaceful idealists only a few years before I was born, and it took the intervention of the National Guard to integrate schools and ensure the Voting Rights Act wasn’t a sick joke. I grew up hearing “good” men, friends of your grandfather, tell racist jokes well into the 1970s. I have friends from college, born after the moon shot, who nevertheless have the memory of being called “nigger” to their face. It’s not dead, not yet anyway.

This is also all history for you. This also part of the litany of names and dates and places some terribly boring teacher has tried to cram into your head at some point. But let me tell you: no matter how amazing and moved and happy Erin and I were to watch Barack Obama take that oath last Tuesday at what your dad and I called “the end of an Error,” our happiness cannot compare to the collective joy of the African-Americans in that Inaugural crowd. An older black couple, about your Grandmother Green’s age, stood near us. If I’m right about their ages, the were born in the war, and remember Selma and lunch counters and colored-only water fountains and the absurdity of great jazz musicians playing in clubs where they couldn’t get served. But on Tuesday, the 20th of January, 2009, they watched as American moved from Jim Crow to Barack Obama in a single lifetime, a transition that a makes your great-great grandmother Anise’s stores of moving from horseback to 747 seem like a hop over a puddle.

This is why so many people went to Washington. The hope and the change and the promise after eight years of Bush, yes, but behind that a groundswell of amazement and pride and happiness about the way we were getting the change we needed. In 1938, Langston Hughes wrote “America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath — America will be!” In 2009, we got a lot closer to being what Hughes was talking about, to being who we said we’d be in 1776. We aren’t there yet. We’ll probably never get there; the ideals Jefferson set out are almost impossible, and assume our better Angels will always hold sway, but they are who we say we want to be. America is an aspirational state. But it’s that American optimism that makes me believe that by the time you’re old enough to read this, we’ll be even closer to that ideal than we are now, in January of 2009.

Love,

Uncle Chet

CC: Caroline, Natalie, and a nephew to be named later

Cash as proof of guilt? The DEA thinks so.

Professional poker player David Peat was mugged by the DEA to the tune of about sixty large at the Detroit airport for buying a first class ticket with cash. They say he may get his cash and watch back later.

Someone needs to put the legal smackdown on these thugs. Seizing property without a criminal conviction is theft, plain and simple, and those who engage in it should be held accountable, from the agents doing the seizing to their supervisors to those who made the policy. It’s absurd, grotesque, and unamerican. Cash is not a crime.

Warren Ellis finds the Cool

These photocollages from Sergei Larenkov blend WWII-era black and whites with modern color shots taken from the same perspective in the same place for a ghostly same-place-different-time montage.

It sounds a little weird when described, but just go look. It’s very cool.

Posted in Pix

Dept. of Shit That Annoys Me Today

  1. I love my iPhone, and one thing I love about it is that it can join wifi networks when they’re in range. However, when I’m not at home, I end up having to keep this feature off because most of the wifi I encounter is set up such that the wifi network itself is only quasi-open; you have to open a browser and “log in” to get real access to the outside world. This is only slightly irritating on a laptop, but it’s a utility killer on a phone of any kind — I pull out my phone to check mail, and it’ll take me a minute to discover the “network” I’m on is useless, and that I’ll need to revert to cell. Fuck you, Starbuck’s.

  2. I hate the entire “worse is better” state of affairs with outboard drives. USB 2 “won” by being cheaper (and, as a consequence, slower in practice) than Firewire 400, but the Achilles’ heel is that USB2 wasn’t meant to carry power, so the so-called “bus powered” no-power-plug USB drives frequently require TWO USB ports to function. Maybe this works for people on desktops, but my laptop only has two USB ports, and the Seagate I’m arguing with now seems to need to be plugged directly in, not via a (powered) hub. Goodbye, full-sized keyboard and nice mouse, at least for the next little while. Grrrr. Firewire R00lz.

Yet another reason why being a kid today is better

Compared to the games of today available for kids, Candyland and its ilk sucked balls.

The problem is true interactivity and the influence of chance. Games children play today — especially electronic or video games — tend to reward decision-making and paying attention and decoding the environment of the game. Games like Candyland are 100% games of chance, with no hope of mastery and no reward for paying attention or experimenting.

Super Mario Brothers is a vastly more interesting task, cognitively speaking, than drawing cards and rolling dice.

Comeuppance coming?

Rep. Conyers has issued a new subpoena to Karl Rove in re: the US attorney firings. With Bush in the White House, this was a nonstarter — but the courts have rejected the absolute-immunity argument, and Obama previously called the claim “completely misguided.”

It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Update: Looks like it’s up to Obama.

Libertarian Take on Obama’s Executive Orders

Agitator Radley Balko put it this way: “Holy Crap!” Some excerpts:

[I]n a broad swipe at the Bush administration’s lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001.

It’s worth emphasizing again here these steps Obama’s taking effectively limit his own power. That’s extraordinary.

Today in Future Tech

Photojournalist David Bergman created a 1,474 megapixel composite image of the Inauguration that you can scroll around and zoom with, a la Blade Runner. It takes a while to load, but it’s amazingly cool once you get it. Check it out.

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Yeow. It’ll be a while before we’re capturing this kind of data with our point-and-shoots, but that it’s possible now at all is pretty cool.

Posted in Pix