From Amazon’s MP3 store:
Today’s Top MP3 Artists
1. Pink Floyd
2. The Apples In Stereo
3. Feist
4. Kanye West
5. KT Tunstall
…
Ok, I love that The Apples in Stereo are number two on this list. But…I just hope it’s not because people are trying to get better sound out of their iPods. Or anything out of their iPhones…
For awhile now, I’ve been thinking about buying a new computer. I’ve been so sure that I was going to buy a new computer that I let my virus program lapse over a year ago (I since got a trial version, of TrendMicro, which worked great but which I never actually bought.)
My problem is that I was certainly leaning toward buying a mac. But I wasn’t fully committed. So I’ve been putting it off and putting it off and kind of intentionally not putting any effort into my current computer because it’s days were numbered. But on Tuesday, it gave up the ghost.
So now I’m going to buy that new computer. But then I’m going to go buy the $30 power supply that will get my old computer back up and running like new so I can take all the non-critical stuff off of it. (The critical stuff was getting backed up daily.)
Kinda doesn’t make sense, does it?
Joshua Holland has some ideas about the spines of Senate Democrats.
It’s far fetched, perhaps, but I’ve got another idea.
Look, we all know MoveOn. org isn’t really that radical. But after all, Dems are the ones who have somehow managed to maintain the perception that Dennis Kucinich is a radical. Heck, they don’t even argue against the term “radical Islamists” when in reality, they are more reactionary–aren’t they typically seeking a world where traditional Islamic law replaces permissive Western elements?
My theory is that the Democratic Leadership understands that the “left” will vote for their candidate no matter what in order to avoid their major-party candidate of choice losing to a Republican as happened in 2000 and 2004. So why even address the core? The Democrats now are just trying to win as many Republican votes as they can.
Whatcha think?
So. For some reason, I was stumbling around the likes of such a mainstream paper as the NY Times. It’s been awhile, but apparently, their Op-Ed columns are free again. At any rate, I came across Paul Krugman’s “blog” which is highlighting his upcoming book. Being visual, I naturally took some time to look at the graph he presents (originally estimated by Piketty and Saez), which shows a change in income inequality over time. According to their estimates, income inequality in the US now is similar to what it was between the end of World War I and the tail end of the Great Depression (when New Deal reforms began to make a difference,) which Krugman considers to be part of the economic Gilded Age. Fascinating.
Just before stumbling into Krugman’s corner, I came across an article on Ayn Rand. The author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged merited an article because it’s been 50 years or so since the latter was published. I read The Fountainhead on a recommendation and, well, it really didn’t do anything for me. The characters were too flat. How do you prove anything with unrealistic characters? So I never got to Atlas Shrugged although I have, from time to time, considered reading it.
But the idea that admiration for Rand’s ideals as set forth in that novel can lead to success is questionable. Certainly, the article’s author didn’t question many unsuccessful adherents to Objectivism, did she? And while anyone with a shred of confidence in Capitalism seems to admire Alan Greenspan, I would say Whole Food’s Mackey is by no means a sterling example of someone whose ideals I’d aspire to hold. Nor are Nabisco and Kraft companies I particularly admire (Caveat: yes I work for a food company. But I haven’t bought Nabisco or Kraft products for some time, before I began working in the food industry.)
And, going beyond that, I think most true leaders realize that the scope of human behavior often necessitates a place for people whose values may be different than their own. The hungry, get-the-competition types are fine for Sales and Marketing or Purchasing. But would you really want them working with customers or managing large groups?
But I’m probably the big loser. The marketing guys are hotshots and our VP of Operations was handpicked out of college (from a management program.) And whadaya know, the latest crop of management students has people getting fasttracked, too. Tying things back to Krugman’s graph, try working your way up your org chart some time at salary.com. Do you see the same big jump at a certain level that I do? I’m told that the country needs more engineers but it looks to me like my best option, in an Objectivist sense, is to roll the dice on an MBA degree. I’m trying to figure out how that serves society, though.
Back in my supply chain days, I actually spent a few days with a couple of the (hotshot) forecasters and (the software company) John Galt’s Trepte. I know I thought it at the time, and if I was feeling clever, I may have actually asked, “so…who is John Galt?”
The Economist’s cover story this week is “Who’s afraid of Google.” In one page or less, an editorial discusses Google’s privacy concerns as well as the concerns of media and communications companies before arguing that (as it always does) a pure capitalist approach is surely the best.
Ironically, the past week has found a couple of pieces of the Google umbrella, YouTube and Blogger, fumbling a bit.
While it’s difficult to get a coherent argument from either side of the YouTube case, it seems that an evangelist seeking to gain a wide audience for his videos distributed them with language that specifically stated it had no copyright had videos spoofing him removed (and a YouTube user banned) for Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations. The case is almost laughable but it certainly shows some landmines for YouTube. Who decides what constitutes a violation? Plenty of material on YouTube takes scenes or sounds from copyrighted material–this is covered as “fair use.” The video in question doesn’t come close to touching that line. Oops.
Perhaps a far bigger gaffe is the removal (inadvertent or otherwise) of Frank Warren’s popular PostSecret site on Blogger. This has created a bit of a stir among that portion of the internet community who count on reading PostSecret as part of their Sunday morning ritual. The apparent reassignment of the site to “nicole” (I have a feeling that name is going to have a poor showing as a new baby name in the last quarter) is creating a bit of an uproar. Word, apparently from Warren, is that this was shutdown because it was tagged as a spam site. This sort of outage (in the short term at least) isn’t terribly uncommon and has driven many a Blogger blogger (such as myself) to other hosts. Yet PostSecret (which one imagines must be one of the most-viewed sites on Blogger) has stuck with the service.
When you work with a live service, things are different. Disruptions like this are unacceptable, even for a free service. Google probably needs to ensure that the people pulling the trigger at YouTube, Blogger and the rest of their services have the oversight they need to not screw up. This evidently isn’t in place. And in a way, it’s a little sad, because it signals a necessary change in their culture. No longer can they get by on being hip–they have become big enough to need some of that infamous Bureaucratic Red Tape. They need their slogan to be not just “Don’t be evil” but “don’t be stupid.”
Update:
Blogger got their act together after only four or five hours of downtime (based on the comments at YouTube of all sites.) Hmm. My company can get and install a replacement server in that time.
Update 2:
Well, let’s talk about some other failures. For instance, ones that led to factual errors in the above article. First off, my IT department in fact took 28 hours to replace the server in question. Good thing it died on a Friday. Next, the Economist cover story I mentioned is from the week of 9/1; the post office only delivered my copy two weeks late. In fairness, we put a hold order on our mail for that week, but even so, it should have been delivered when the hold expired four days earlier. But our mailman is exceptionally lazy.
My final thoughts on all this are that everyone is, truly, unqualified for the job they’re doing. Sure, I’m unqualified, too. But hey, at least I’m working on it.
Don’t blink. Apparently while I was on vacation, Apple announced something that actually may hold my interest. To wit, an iPhone without the phone part. They are calling this the iPod touch. While it only has 16GB built in, what it does have is Wifi. Not that this is revolutionary in a device of this type, but, for me at least, this bridges a gap. More on that below.
Engadget’s users seemed unimpressed. Why the nice interface and only 16GB? Why not a hard drive (instead of a flash drive) so that you could carry lots of videos, or your entire music collection?
But in a way, perhaps they miss the point. The let’s-have-everything-even-if-we-aren’t-really-going-to-use-it-all model works great for phone manufacturers. How often have you used the music player on your phone? What if it had a couple of GB of memory? (MS seems to think I will; they tell me so every time I plug my phone in.) Perhaps at the 2GB level, *if* I could play DRM-protected songs and *if* my phone had an 1/8″ headphone jack, I would. But I have reconciled myself, in the short term at least, to the fact that I’ll have a gadget for this and a gadget for that. If one gadget isn’t particularly good at either of the jobs I’m using it to perform, it’s worthless, even if it can technically do both jobs.
This being the first Wi-fi iPod, Apple is shooting for something else. That truly all-in-one device is still tantalizing close, but yet to be seen.
The idea intrigues me; perhaps, finally, my 5-year old Clie, which ran on the Palm OS, had 16 MB of built-in memory and which was discontinued by Sony in, like, 2003, has a device that could possibly replace it. The only problem is that it’s about six months late. My Clie’s battery gave up the ghost six months ago and I’ve sort of gotten used to not having the extra weight in my pocket. I don’t miss it as much as I might.
Luckily, being about 10 years removed from a large influx of people new to email, I’m not often the recipient of junk forwards. But I did catch wind of the Anti-Barack Obama email that’s been circulating about as long as Obama has been mentioned as a contender for the ‘08 Democratic nomination.
My favorite part is the assertion that Obama was sworn into service on the Koran instead of the Bible. Of course, this addition is the result of Representative Keith Ellison’s (D-MN) slightly (but nonetheless unbelievably) controversial swearing-in which occurred this past January.
Naturally, one senses a group of nativist and faith-wise individuals would have been most likely the source of such an email. I find it interesting that there is some reluctance to rule out Democrats as the source (and there is certainly a nativist contingent in that party as well.) Or perhaps the original author was a Democrat attempting to make the reactionary Republicans look like a stronger majority.
But no matter the source, the force that has propagated it has been ignorance. Confusing Senator Obama, sworn in in 2005, with Representative Ellison, sworn in in 2007 requires ignorance born of laziness.
Speaking of lies…The Carpetbagger Report highlighted the latest stats on how many people still believe 9/11 and Iraq were linked.
A different view from the Natural Bridge. You can see the canyon...
A cave in the Natural Bridge State Park
The lower arch of the Natural Bridge. There are places to get...
Flowers on a rusty barbed-wire fence. Hinckley, OH
Tenacious leaf at Boonesboro State Forest, KY
Ahh, the luminous green of spring. Still struggling with light...
A Random Photo