Microsoft: Always learning, always adapting

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Or not, if you listen to MS’ CIO Ron Markezich. In an interview with CNet, he gave this answer when asked about Linux usage at MS:

As a policy, I don’t run anything that competes with Microsoft. My goal is to make sure Microsoft products are the best products in the world. It’s an easy choice for me, in that sense–to run Microsoft technology. We don’t run Unix. We don’t run Linux. We don’t run Oracle. We’re 100 percent Windows, SQL Server. We do, in areas on the client, have an open-source client running–just for competitive analysis. As an IT organization, I have no skills and no ability and no purchasing of those products. We don’t even run J2EE. Everything is .Net.

Excellent strategy, Ron. Insularity: it’s what’s for dinner!

What a fucking tool.

Smile.

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So we finally picked up Brian Wilson’s long-delayed magnum opus, and of it, I have only this to say:

It’s gonna be a long damn time before I can hear “Good Vibrations” without a voice in my head singing along with “Sunkist orange soda taste sen-sa-shuns” as part of the chorus. Goddamn advertising.

Check out Buttercup

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Widely blogged, still worth it: BoingBoing points out an exhibit of skeletal drawings of popular cartoon characters. So what DOES your skull look like if you have PowerPuff Girl eyes? Now you know. (Try the mirror if the main link doesn’t work.)

Your tax dollars at work

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Salon takes a look at some of the claims of the “abstinence only” programs being fed American kids in the name of “education.” Sen. Waxman is on the case, thank goodness. Among the claims:

  • HIV can be contracted through sweat or tears;
  • Touching genitals can result in pregnancy;
  • Condoms do not prevent HIV;
  • Half of gay male teens are HIV+

And it gets even better:

Waxman also criticized some programs for reinforcing sexist stereotypes to children. One — Why Know — says: “Women gauge their happiness and judge their success by their relationships. Men’s happiness and success hinge on their accomplishments.” Another program, Wait Training, says: “Just as a woman needs to feel a man’s devotion to her, a man has a primary need to feel a woman’s admiration. To admire a man is to regard him with wonder, delight, and approval. A man feels admired when his unique characteristics and talents happily amaze her.”

Not much to say about that, is there?

What “Reality TV” Could Have Been

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We’re sure virtually no one has seen it, since it’s on Bravo, but The Long Way Round chronicles Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s motorbike trip around the world, from London to New York going east. It’s only six hour-long episodes (covering a 120-day trip), but it’s brilliant. We’re sure it’ll be on DVD before long, or in reruns on Bravo. Look for it.

We just like that he called it “chetgasm”

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Mr Diztopia (who comes as no surprise (extra points if you get that reference (HDANCN?))) has posted a little photographic memory lane of shots involving Your Esteemed Heathen Host, predominately from a trip he made to visit Houston in 1995.

They involve, left to right, starting from the top:

  1. David McGhee and I, Tuscaloosa, sometime before 1994;
  2. Me, 3733 Gramercy, Houston, summer 1995 (note jaunty string of Chet-heads);
  3. Me, student ghetto apartment, Tuscaloosa terrible shot, probably drunk, early summer, 1994;
  4. Me, probably on the phone to identity-crushing sociologist students, Gramercy house, 1995;
  5. Mr Diztopia and I, Ginger Man, Houston, summer 1995;
  6. The rest room of said esteemed establishment, same evening;
  7. Longtime Heathen Mr O’Corn and I, Alice’s Tall Texan, Houston, summer 1995;
  8. The Former Mrs Diztopia (common law) and I, Tall Texan, same evening;
  9. Mr Diztopia, my old car, and I, summer 1995.

Heh. “Chetgasm.” Heh.

How the religious nutbirds make us look

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This Guardian review of the Kinsey biopic includes commentary on the efforts of conservatives to demonize Kinsey and his research, which continue to this day. Read the whole thing, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the sea change Kinsey’s work helped bring about, but the article’s final graphs are the best:

[T]he religious right still fear and despise Kinsey and all his works. Check out some of the (apparently coordinated) responses to the new movie. “Kinsey’s proper place is with Nazi doctor Josef Mengele,” says Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America, inadvertently showing us what he thinks of the Holocaust. Robert Peters of Morality in Media: “That’s part of Kinsey’s legacy: Aids, abortion, the high divorce rate, pornography.” Focus on the Family’s film critic (they have a film critic?), Tom Neven, calls the movie “rank propaganda for the sexual revolution and the homosexual agenda”. And Judith Reisman, who has waged a decades-long war against Kinsey’s memory, refers to “a legacy of massive venereal disease, broken hearts and broken souls”. These people are of a piece with new Republican congressmen who really have sex on the brain, such as Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who thinks there is an epidemic of lesbianism in Oklahoma schools, and South Carolina’s Jim DeMint (that second ‘i’ should really be an ‘e’) who wants gays and pregnant single mothers barred from teaching decent, God-fearing hillbillies. At the dawn of a digitised, globalised millennium, these creeps want the clocks turned back to a time when the church held sway over our sexuality. They prefer us ignorant and terrified, alone in the dark, the better for them to control us through fear and guilt. Too bad for them that we live in the bright, vivid light of our incandescent dirty dreams.

And thank God for that.

Semiobligatory World of Warcraft post

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If you like really astounding computer games, then World of Warcraft is something worth looking into. Like EverCrackQuest, it’s a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), which means that when you play, you’re playing with other real humans in a persistent world that keeps happening even when you’re not playing. There have been several games in this genre, set in fantasy worlds, science fiction worlds, and even superhero universes; WoW is in a Tolkeinesque fantasy world, and is at this point the king of the hill. Over half a million people played the beta test, and the population of the production world is off to a seriously good start (expecting 750K by 1/1).

All this is my way of saying: I’m playing, and here’s where I am. WoW allows up to 50 characters (there are different races and classes, so you can have an elf wizard and a human fighter, too) across all their “worlds” (for reasons that should be obvious, everyone doesn’t play in the same world; there are a few dozen worlds, so if you want to play with friends, you have to coordinate to be in the same universe).

As of today, I have the following characters:

  • Cleetus, a 13th level night elf rogue, currently hanging out in the Darkshore area on the Silver Hand server, Pacific time zone. (Blizzard sorts the servers by time zone, but it doesn’t really matter where you play; however, it’s easier to find a given server if you know what time zone it’s in.) Silver Hand is an RP server (more on this below).
  • Dedchet, a level 5 undead warlock currently in Tirisfal Glades (the undead start area) on the Sargeras server. Sargeras is a PvP server in the Central time zone.
  • Harry, a level 9 dwarven hunter currently in the Dun Morogh area on the Mountain time PvP server Kel’Thuzad.

Now, one more thing: the servers are all of one of two types. On PvE servers (of which RP, or role playing, servers are a subset), you are playing primarily against the environment, not other players, though in all worlds there IS a war on. WoW’s 8 races are divided into “Alliance” (humans, dwarves, gnomes, and night elves) and “Horde” (orcs, undead, trolls, and tauren, which are minotaur-esque pastoral critters). Alliance is nominally (but not simplistically) “good”; Horde is similarly cast as “evil,” but it’s not that simple in the game politics. On all servers players fighting players is possible, but only on PvP servers is that the default mode of interaction in general. It’s therefore “safer” for a beginner to play on a PvE server, though if you wander into an enemy city on any server you may expect to die quickly, and you’re in danger in contested areas of the world no matter what kind of server you’re on.

One more server thing: for reasons that should be obvious, you cannot play both sides of the fence on a PvP server (i.e., have both Alliance and Horde characters). It’s okay to do this on PvE or RP servers.

See you there!

Sony Entertainment Admits Defeat

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Up to now, Sony Electronics — the godfather of portable audio! — has been at best an “also-ran” in the portable MP3 market. Why? Not because of crappy hardware or high prices (though these help); no, it’s worse than that. Sony also includes Sony Entertainment, which makes records (sort of). Consequently, Sony Electronics wasn’t permitted to create a music player that just plain played unrestricted MP3 files; in order to pay your music on one of Sony’s devices, you had to convert it all to ATRAC3 or somesuch, and use their goofy software that tried to keep up with how often you downloaded your tunes to the device. Basically, they were trying to sell a device that was a real pain in the ass to use, but were competing against Apple’s iPod and the myriad of copycats who saw no problem with supporting plain old MP3 playback and transfer.

What’s really fucked up about this is that, if my understanding is correct, Sony Entertainment is seriously the tail wagging the dog here; Sony Electronics contributes way more to the bottom line, and yet still somehow ended up being the RIAA’s bitch.

But only up to now; Sony Electronics has finally admitted its players suck, and has released a firmware upgrade to allow them to play MP3. New players will have MP3 capability built in. Of course, given the strength of the iPod brand — it’s clearly the heir to the Walkman — it will be difficult for Sony to regain its position in the market; this little imbroglio almost certainly cost them millions.

Talmadge Heflin, Enormous Jackass of Evil

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Heflin lost his bid to return to the State House. By “lost” we mean “lost the count AND the recount.” So, because we live in a country ruled by laws, he stepped aside.

No, of course, not. Heflin is a Republican, so he’s contesting the election in the GOP-dominated Texas House, where the Speaker has already stated that the winner, Democrat Hubert Vo, will never be seated in “his” House.

Dept. of Recent History

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About a year ago, I asked my mother for my grandmother’s diamonds. She died in 2001, soon after Erin and I started dating. They aren’t large, but they are meaningful; her engagement stone has been in another setting for twenty-odd years (my grandfather died in 1972), and has been worn by both mom and my late grandmother.

About six months ago, she brought them to me in Houston.

About three weeks ago, I took them to a local jeweler, who agreed to create a ring around them.

About noon today, I picked up a new ring made of Mimi’s stones plus one new one. It is beautiful.

Until about three today, I’d planned to use this ring on Sunday night, the third anniversary (“Sunday after Thanksgiving”) of our first date, a U2 concert in Dallas in 2001.

At about 3:05 today, I realized waiting until Sunday was no longer a possibility.

At 3:10 today, I rejected the plan offered by Certain Longtime Heathen Readers to wait until the security checkpoint at IAH on Friday (basically, insist that the metal detector’s buzz is “because of this pesky thing in my pocket; honey, come here and see if it buzzes if you carry it,” and pull a bit of a Jumbotron trick in front of the TSA goons).

At 6:00 today, I picked up The Girl. At this point, I was still a bit woozy from the whole prospect.

At 6:05 today, she said, when asked, that we should go to Tafia for cocktail food.

At 6:06 today, I hatched a pseudoplan.

At 6:30 today, she obligingly complained that she’d not gotten a manicure ahead of our aforementioned trip this weekend, and that therefore her nails didn’t look as good as she’d like.

At 6:31 today, I took her left hand, still profferred for examination in re: nail care, and kneeled in the middle of the Tafia lounge. “I have something that may fix the nail problem.”

At 6:31:05 today, we became engaged.

Goddamn, we’re happy.

We’re geeky, but not THIS geeky

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HTML Tattoo Besides, if we’d gotten a tattoo like that, we wouldn’t use “align”; it’s deprecated, and who wants an obsolete tattoo?

(Photo from BME’s Geek Tattoo gallery, via BoingBoing. Said gallery includes many clever bits and at least one astoundingly unlikely one.

{Why? Because it’s the symbol of a particularly hardcore and ubergeeky distribution of Linux, and it’s on what appears to be a pretty girl’s belly. [HDANCN?]})

It’s Monday. How about TWO nutcases?

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BobSagetIsGod.com needs no description.

However, Molatar’s Castle defies description; we can, however, give you a quote:

The features of my proposed dragon body were told to me by the Holy Spirit in February of 2004. Before I could pray for a dragon body, I needed to determine what I was praying for exactly. The Holy Spirit was very generous and described for me a powerful dragon body I was comfortable with. Once I knew what my body looked like, I told the Holy Spirit that I accepted His description and to go ahead with the shape-shift. I leave you this compilation so that if you need to change into a dragon, you have the specifications already worked out.

Dept. of Creeping Puritanism

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Our congresscritters have been regaled this week with tales of the New Enemy, PORNOGRAPHY, which is apparently a HUGE threat to our country now (and never you mind terrorism, the economy, the deficit, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, etc.; we’re now threatened by HARD CORE FUCKIN’). Wired News’ coverage seems to be the best account. One witness famously described the porn plague as worse than crack or heroin (we suppose we’ve just missed the ravaged inner cities and rampant violence associated with porn).

The best part of the story is the demand by one particularly uptight group (California Protective Parents Association, in the person of Judith Reisman) that we fund research into “erototoxins,” which are produced when we view arousing pornography:

Pornography triggers myriad kinds of internal, natural drugs that mimic the “high” from a street drug. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub erototoxins — mind-altering drugs produced by the viewerÕs own brain. […] A basic science research team employing a cautiously protective methodology should study erototoxins and the brain/body. State-of-the-art brain scanning studies should answer these questions with hard, replicable data. As with the tobacco suits, these data could be helpful in litigation and in affecting legal change. […] An offensive strategy should be planned, mandating law enforcement collection of all pornography data at crime sites and judges, police, lawyers and law schools should receive training in the hard data of sexology fraud and erototoxins as changing brains absent informed consent. Congress should end all Federal funding of educational institutions that train students with bogus Kinseyan academic pornography and/or that teach pornography as harmless. Congress should also remove the authority of so-called sexology institutes–most of whom are pornography grantees–to confer professional credentials and serve as expert witnesses. Cite

Of course, the thoroughly debunked ex-gay movement has its say, too, through Jerry Satinover:

Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance,” Satinover said. “That is, it causes masturbation, which causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can’t do, in effect.”

Could these people be more hysterical? “Erototoxins“? We wonder how these porn-induced erototoxins differ from the changes in our brains due to arousal from, say, normal human sexual activity. Smart money says “not at all,” and once you realize that, you realize that these people are threatened by sexuality, not pornography.

Of course, with the religious right calling the tune, this may not matter; their hostility to any sort of discussion of sexuality — let alone actual material designed to be arousing, sex toys, and erotic literature — is well documented, and this puritannical strain of American culture desperately wants to force its values on the rest of us. And with this administration, they have more influence than ever before. Pay attention.

Snarky? You bet. Rude? Totally. But also awesome.

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Gawker reports this celeb-siting; we really hope it’s true:

Freemans, tuesday night the 16th of nov. the bush twins , along with 2 massive secret service men, tried to have dinner. they were told by the maitre’d that they were full and would be for the next 4 years. upon hearing, the entire restaurant cheered and did a round of shots… it was amazing!!! [Ed: We’re hearing that this is actually true.]